Determine which Keywords to use While Doing your SEO
It’s not an easy task to determine which keywords to use while doing your SEO (also known as Search Engine Optimization) for your website. Unless you are highly familiar with the concept and dynamics of SEO, choosing a few simple words, well . . . it isn’t that simple. For those of you who are unfamiliar with SEO in general – I’ll make it easy for you. Go to Google. Type in something you want to find or learn about in their search engine. The first entries that come up and the reason as to why they came up in the order they did, is all due in part to SEO.
In recent articles, I’ve gone over what to use, how to increase your ranking, etc. But I never really went over how to choose your key words which is the most important part! When choosing my key words for SEO – first and foremost, I do a test run. I will run a sample search in google and see what results I get for a specific phrase – I specifically look to see how many sites or pages come up with that EXACT keyword. For instance, “web design Westchester ny” has those key words in every link until about the 20th or 21st page. That means that it’s a pretty popular SEO key word search. From this, I can conclude that it will be a little more difficult to get on the first page since my search resulted in quite a few pages that I’d have to beat out. IMPORTANT: This does NOT mean that this is a popular keyword that people are searching with, instead it is what companies or websites are using as their keywords for people to find.
One of my favorite ways to combat my competitors is to use google adwords. Yes I know this is meant to advertise your website on google, however, they actually have a pretty awesome tool called keyword tool. This tool allows you to search a particular keyword and then tell you keywords that are similar and what their monthly search volume is, what last months search volume was, and what level of competition you have. It’s a pretty awesome tool I think! This is where I basically get my key words. You always want to find a keyword (using google adwords keyword tool or whatever tool satisfies you) that has a good search volume and a low level competition scale. A keyword may have a high search volume, but if you can’t get on the first page then it is useless. I would rather have a keyword with a search volume of 100 a month where I am the first link, than be on the 5th page of a keyword with a search volume of 1000. That could be 100 new potential customers that will visit my site, versus MAYBE 1000 new customers that may never even get to your site. Think of this question… when you search on google how often do you go to page 5?
In your keywords you should always try to specify a location, because local SEO is much easier then just doing a keyword of ‘dog walker’. That will be almost impossible to get on the first page unless you are posting articles every ten minutes for years. The more specific your keywords are the easier it will be to get on the first page of a search engine. Don’t think which keyword has the most volume, think of which keyword will get you the potential customers and the sales you need. Another issue I have with SEO is all the websites that ask you to pay them hundreds of dollars to keep track of all your SEO. Google allows you to do this for free with a few of their applications, so don’t fall into the trap of paying $200 dollars a month for a company to just tell you what your stats are. It’s completely different if they are actually doing the leg work to get you on the first pages of google, but not if you are doing the majority of the work and just want to know what your rank is and what your opponents ranks are.
Tags: keywords, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
