SEO Keywords: A Few Words on Selecting Keywords to increase website traffic quality
Connect With People. Start by talking to your customers (or intended) and ask how did they discover your business. Use the comments to help imagine your target audience, which dictates the primary direction of your website structure. Benchmarking similar sites can infer some ideas - Compete and Quantcast are great sources for comparing sites. But keep in mind, sites have unique visitor experiences and a specific business model (target customer, revenue) which may impact their content selection. So note what you see, but keep in mind the context in which the words or phrases used may be different than how you use it for your business.
Write the words. Prepare a list of words and phrases that you think your audience might type into search engines when looking for your site. Don't worry about being perfect: just be creative for brainstorming’s sake.
Qualify your words with search results and online traffic Use online tools to qualify the words and refine phrases.
Type a word into Google search page and see what appears on the SERP (search engine results page). (Update 9/2012 - Up until 2011 Google included a tool called Wonderwheel in the SERP results. Wonderwheel provided additional suggested results that appear as spokes from your query. Since its discontinuation, many businesses have come to rely on a additional tools, such a Searchmetrics Suite to examine keywords in more detail. But other tools also exist.)
Use Google Insights to determine the search trends indexed by volume and geo-location; Some regions search for “car” rather than “auto”, for example. Word suggestions are also offer here as well.
To gain an idea of which keywords to refine, use a keyword discovery tool like this online cloud checker -- any results 3% and below could probably benefit from appearing more frequently in the content. There are other site checkers available, such as DIYSEO, which can compare site content to competitor sites. All of these can compliment tools that typically come with pay-per-click services, like the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in Google Adwords. Paid solutions typically provide comparisons across all search engines and more nuanced selection features. If you are a small business owner or blogger with little time, a great approach is to work with a free tool that focuses on the search engine initially and develop a budget for refining a broader selection of search engines.
Choose Your Marketing Champaign: Create starter lists of keywords based on your marketing plan -- ones for the site, a second for PPC ad (if used), then a third to be for potential social media usage (Twitter and/or blog content). This will give a focused effort to each channel -- words which can appear on the main website, words in a PPC ad, and tweets exposure on Twitter. As time goes forward, you will figure how to refine and play off each effort, as well as figure out what phrases could be extended as a long tail from the starter list. For example PPC categories are based on keywords selected for a balance of demand and cost.Moreover social and search combination is increasingly affecting conversion. eMarketer posted a report on it in March 2011 -- you can see it here.
Consider how keywords appear on social media against your site content For a website content revision, keywords should appear thoughtfully though the site page - without overwhelming the site’s main message. Meta tags have lost emphasis with search engines over time, but they still should be used. More effective is the description tag which looks like the script below:<meta name="description" lang="en" content="...." />The title tag on a webpage is also fair game for a keyword treatment <title>...</title> Many search engine rely on the description and title to describe a page, so try using more keyword phrases, and if feasible use one or two keywords in the page name. Keep in mind that Google Instant has modified search behavior since its introduction in 2010: Many people select the SERP from the first 3 to 4 words. Also, Facebook, along with many sharing sites like BizSugar, Digg, and SeededBuzz, rely on the descriptions to explain blog posts, so including keyword and keyword phrases aid traffic discovery and help with posts within social media.Never keyword “stuff”, which is inserting keywords every other word in the body of the site.
Consider a thorough overhaul of site keywords periodically Online demand for keyword traffic can change the effectiveness of keywords over time -- consider a thorough overhaul of site keywords at least once a year if you are only running a site, more frequently with marketing media usage (offline & online ads, blogs, social media, etc) and monthly with e-commerce and online sales. Apply knowledge of your offering, industry, and business operations to an analytics solution in order to guide update ideas. Use the content dashboards in a web analytics solution (Google Analytics, Piwik, Yahoo Web Analytics, Going Up!, Woopra, etc.), as well as search results data, to consider effective phrases that produced average time on site, high conversion, and low bounce rate metrics.
Never presume that just inserting the right keywords in a site is the silver bullet for all your online sales. As implied in point 4, many ways exist to discover a site online -- tweets, Facebook mentions, podcast mentions, mentions in online videos, sites for sharing posts, online presentations, and -- wait for it -- offline activity via attending trade shows, presentations, appearances. There’s a good reason Google Analytics examines direct traffic, referral sources, search traffic and more -- In short, your site can be discovered in many ways, so the days of just throwing up a website and expecting traffic are long gone (and I doubt they ever existed). Moreover, search engine algorithms updates can change the amount of traffic arriving to your site, so a keyword review can insure that you are keeping up with the changes. The best sites manage a number of traffic sources to successfully connect with people.
2 comments on “SEO Keywords: A Few Words on Selecting Keywords to increase website traffic quality”
[...] your starting to evaluate keywords, see this Zimana post to gain some ideas. If you are planning to incorporate video, try this post for starting ideas. Read more [...]
[...] your starting to evaluate keywords, see this Zimana post to gain some ideas. If you are planning to incorporate video, try this post for starting ideas. Read more [...]
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