How to Identify Keywords?
The center of optimization are the keyword phrase(s) for which you want a high ranking in search engines result pages (SERP’s).
When you choose you keyword phrase you must take in consideration primarily your market (they must reflect what you sell) , the number of searches for it and the competition for that particularly keyword phrase.
Using keyword research tools is the perfect way to find out your keywords and also get some suggestions. One of the best research keyword tool is WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com). By entering a keyword related to your market it shows other related terms (singular and plural) and it analyzes the competition for every one of them.
Let’s take an example: you are a hotel booking agent. Using a keyword research tool you have these results (for aguments sake):
- Hotels 70,000 /day
- UK hotels 5,000 /day
- hotels in London 300 /day
- hotels in central london 175 /day
Many may try to optimize for “hotels” due to its large number of searches. The problem with this keyword (other then the competition for it) is that is not targeted for your market, the people searching for this keyword might look for hotels in Americal and Asia. Even “UK hotels” isn’t going to bring the targeted traffic that “hotels in London” or “hotels in central london” will. There are many other terms related to your market and, once they are found, an analysis of the competition and the searches for each term must be done in order to determine an optimal report between how competitive a keyword phrase is and how hard is to attain a top 10 position for it in SERP’s. You must keep in mind that:
- Search engines consider web pages not entire sites so optimization must be done for each page in particular;
- The more targeted a keyword phrase is the less traffic it gets, but that traffic will provide people interested in your product or service so the conversion rate is higher. This indicator is reflecting the percentage of people converted into buyers so the higher the better.
- Decide on two or three highly targeted phrases for each page of your site
