The most important part of building or optimizing a website is the selection of the right keywords for SEO.? If you do not identify and target the right keywords, everything else you do will be in vain.? Target the right keywords and your website will be a success.? The right people will search for and find the information relevant to them.? Target the wrong keywords and you?ll miss out on the critical website traffic you need to stay competitive.
Importance of Keywords
Without choosing the right keywords, the theme of your website will not be focused.? As a result, your website will not rank high on search engines.? Take some time to identify the keywords that describe your business, offering, or audience.
If you incorporate the right keywords throughout your website you ensure your content stays on track.? This will greatly increase your chances of gaining high positions on Google for search phrases that will generate traffic to your website.
To get started, ask yourself, ?What would someone type into Google if they were looking for what I offer??
Now let?s refine this a bit?
Never Use Single-Word Keywords
A common misconception among beginners is that they identify and target only a single word as their ?keyword?.? This is entirely wrong, and if you make this mistake, you will be disappointed with your search engine rankings.? To get top placements for a single-word keyword (other than your business name) is virtually impossible.? Let?s flesh out this concept a little bit more.
Say you are a Real Estate attorney who has just published a Do-It-Yourself Real Estate Law Guide for Tenants.? You would like to build a website to sell this book online so you come up with a few options for the keywords you?d like to target, including:
- Book
- Real Estate Book
- Real Estate Law Book
- Do It Yourself Real Estate Law Book for Tenants
The difference between these four options is obvious.? They become increasingly more descriptive and relevant to the people you are selling to.? Targeting the keyword ?Book? would be impossible to rank high for.? Why?? Because it is so vague that the competition is staggering.? Literally ? you would be competing with every other book for sale on the internet.? As you move down the list, you become increasingly more specific.? As that happens, the number of people you are competing with goes down and your chances to rank high go up.
Optimizing for multiple-word keywords has many benefits compared with using single-word keywords, including:
- Less competition for your search phrase
- More relevant visitor traffic
- Better chances of ranking high
Even though the single-word keyword ?Book? might get millions more searches each month compared to the keyword ?Do It Yourself Real Estate Law Book for Tenants?, that difference in traffic is irrelevant.? Nearly everyone searching the term ?Book? is not looking for your specific offering, so it doesn?t matter anyways.? In contrast, virtually ALL the people searching with the keyword ?Do It Yourself Real Estate Law Book for Tenants? are looking for your exact offering.? There is no benefit to simply grabbing tons of traffic.? The traffic must be relevant to be useful.
ProTip:? It is important to note that many professionals in the SEO field use the term ?keyword phrase? synonymously with the term ?multiple-word keyword?.
Creating a Keyword Portfolio
Think of a number of different keywords to make up your keyword portfolio.? First, you want to come up with the ?head keyword?, which will be the keyword that is the most competitive and hardest to rank high for.? It is the primary, main keyword that describes the theme of your website.? The head keyword is between 2-4 words in length.? In the example above, a couple of options for the Head Keyword could be:
- Real Estate Law Guide
- Real Estate Law Book
- Tenant Law Book
- Tenant Law Guide
- Real Estate Legal Book
Write these options down and file them away for now.? Next, you want to come up with a dozen or so ?long tail keywords?.? A long tail keyword is one that is more than 3-4 keywords in length and relevant to a highly specific search phrase.? A few examples could be:
- Legal advice for tenants in PA
- Book on legal responsibilities for tenants
- Landlord tenant disputes guide book
- Guide to Real Estate Law for Tenants
- Do It Yourself Book on Real Estate Law
The main benefit of using long tail keywords in your keyword strategy is that they are much easier to rank initially high for.? If you have a new website then starting with some long tail keywords is the best place to begin.? You won?t get large amounts of traffic, but the traffic you do get will be highly relevant and more likely to convert.
Research to Find the Right Keywords
So by now you have a couple of ideas for your head keyword and a number of possible long tail keywords in mind.? To decide which ones you will use, go to the Google Keyword Tool.? It is a free keyword research tool that is a part of the Google AdWords service.
Put in a number of your keyword possibilities into the ?Word or Phrase? area.? Make sure to click ?Only show ideas closely related to my search terms? and click Search.? In the image below, we follow the example by placing ?real estate law book?, ?tenant law book?, etc. into the search field.
The Google Keyword Tool will then display a report of the keywords, including:
- Competition
- Global Monthly Searches
- Local Monthly Searches
- Ideas for new keywords
As you can see, the keyword ?real estate law book? has high competition and high traffic.? You?ll probably want to make this your head keyword.? The other possibilities, ?tenant law book?, ?tenant law guide?, and ?real estate legal book?, do not have enough traffic to justify reporting (signified by the ?-? in the data grid).? This is not to say that no one searches for this, and in fact, people surely do, they are just not popular enough keywords for data to be tracked by Google.? You will probably want to target these keywords as well in sub areas of your site such as internal pages or blog posts.
Repeat this keyword research process for all of your long tail keyword possibilities as well.? Find ones that have low competition and high traffic.? Since long tail keywords are so specific, they may go unreported.? Even so, you will want to go ahead and use at least some of them anyways (in the title of a blog post for instance) simply because of the extremely high relevance they embody.? For example, ?Do It Yourself Real Estate Law Book? might be a good title for an internal page of your website because it is just too relevant and targeted to pass up.
Choosing the right keywords involves research, brain storming, and some gut instinct.? Take some time to think this through as it?s the most important part of your internet marketing campaign.
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