Choosing The Right Keywords
This is a very important first step! After you find the right keywords and key phrases for your website, you'll be using them in all aspects of marketing your website and SEO, especially the content, titles, and meta tags. The key words that you choose will direct how you market your site. You'll be using these keywords over and over again to really attract visitors to your site!
Making A List And Checking It Twice!
If someone was searching for your website, what would you expect them to enter into the search engine? What is your website about?
Make a list of all the major things your website is about and what you think people would be putting into the search engines. What would people search for if they didn't know the technical terms that apply to your industry? Are there words that could be misspelled? After you make your list, try to think of some more. It doesn't matter if you have too many because at this stage you're just brainstorming. You'll trim your list down later.
Keyword Suggestion Tools
There are a lot of great online and offline tools that will help you find more keywords that you may have overlooked. Many of these tools will also give you an idea of how many people are searching for these keywords and how 'good' the keywords are. My favorite is the Google Keyword Tool since it has a nice visual interface that is easy to understand. You can find it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
- Go to the Google Keyword Tool site.
- Enter your keywords into the text box and click on the 'Get keyword ideas' button.
- Google will generate a list (and it might be a very long list) of your key phrases and other key phrases that are close to yours and get traffic. Go through their listings and evaluate each key phrase for amount of competition (you want low), search volume(high), and how relevant it is for your site. Use the add/remove links to the right of each keyword to generate a final list. You'll want your final list to consist of 20-30 key phrases.
- Usually what I like to do at this point is to export the list and save it as a csv on my computer, so that I can then rank each key phrase by how effective I think it'll be.
- Once you have this key phrase list though, you will want to refer to it often and use the keywords/key phrases as much as you can in your content and other SEO activities. So make sure that you put it some place handy.
Next step: Content & Relevance
I've included links to other keyword suggestion tools below: