Don't Underestimate the Importance of Keyword Research

Keywords are your foundation

The following example will help you understand the intricacies of optimizing web sites for search engines. Let's take a look at the following web site (the blue heading is the HTML title of the web site):

What's wrong with this page? It is a fictitious page, but many web sites commit the same mistake. The problem is the following: Although visitors will understand what the web site and the company are about, search engines lack this sense of semantics. Search engines work on the basis of keywords, without really knowing what those keywords mean.

If someone queries a search engine for "tax consulting boston", the search engine will dig through its huge index and list web pages that contain those three keywords - including the web page above. If the same person searches for "tax advice boston", this web page would not show up.

It is thus crucial to understand what people type into search engines to find a certain service or product and then to create your web site accordingly.

How to start with keyword research

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The problem is that language tends to be ambiguous. Like in the previous example, people might search for tax consulting, tax advice, tax problems, IRS problems or tax nightmare - you name it. Unfortunately, you won't be able to cover all those keywords, so that you will have to make a trade-off by choosing keywords that your web site targets.

There are tools that will help you get an impression of how and what people search for. The most popular commercial and professional tool is Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com), but for most webmasters, free tools such as the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool will do the job.

All those tools have in common that they will ask you for a keyword (e.g. tax) and display related keywords and phrases that you might use (e.g. tax advice, tax problems). Along with the keyword, the tool will tell you the search frequency or the number of people searching for each particular keyword or phrase during the last month. With this tools, your results for the keyword tax might look like this:

Create your keyword target list

Use these results to create a keyword target list that contains all the keywords you want to use throughout your site. Which keywords should you choose? The most frequently searched one (in this case: tax) or the least searched one (tax problem)? Unfortunately, this decision requires much experience. Usually, if you decide to target prominent terms you will have many competing sites that target the same keywords. If you decide to go with less prominent terms, you might end up with very little traffic.

Based on our experience, we might have decided to select these keywords:

Based on this keyword target list, your optimized web site should look like this:

The web page now is more likely to appear for the queries "tax preparation", "tax help" and "tax advice boston". To be sure, this is not a simple task, since you will not achieve a top ten ranking with this web page alone. You will have to use your keywords more frequently on each web page of your site to achieve a high ranking.

But that will be the subject of another Bloofusion article...

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