SEO - keywords - do your research

Author: Lee Rixon

In the last segment we talked about relevant keyword phrases, so at this point you have two or three phrases that you think might work well for your site.

The next step is to check out those keyphrases.

Open up your favourite browser and go to the search page of the search engine that you are trying to optimise for. Type in the keyphrase that you want to check and run the search.

You will get back a list of results. Make note of the following: The words that were actually used for the search

The number of pages returned

Rinse and repeat for each of your potential keyphrases.

What you now have for each of your keyphrases is a list of the relevant words that need to be 'woven' into the elements of your web pages, and also the number of index entries that you are competing against.

At this point, you need to look at the number of index entries - if this number is in the tens or hundreds of millions, then you really need to revisit the keyphrase, as it probably isn't specific enough. You have to think of all of the pages listed as your competition, and if you can't get on the first two or three pages of the search, then for you, that seach phrase just isn't going to be effective.

You can also page through the search results until they start to lose relevance. Search engines sort pages, with what they regard as the most relevant at the top. They may well have 20 million entries for your search phrase, but after the first 60, when you look at them, they really don't seem to make sense. That is because the search engine found some or all of your search terms in each document, but it was more a random collection of the occurrance of the words than the page targetting that subject. If you find very few really relevant pages, then you have a good search key phrase.

This could take some time to do, but its time well spent. If you choose your key phrase well, then even partial page optimization will reap excellent rewards. If you choose badly, then you can optimise the page completely, and not manage to get any results.

About the author: Lee is one of the principals at Spinnaker Systems which provides Web related services to the small business owner. Lee can be contacted at lee@spinnakersystems.com and is a regular contributor to the Spinnaker Blog