Read Part One of Keyword Research.
If you’re working on a brand new project and have no info to start with, begin by making a list of what you think people are searching for when they seek out what you’re going to offer.
Take this list to the keyword tools and run them all through to see what you can learn. You’ll find out that some of your phrases are rarely searched for and others are searched for a lot. You’ll also get suggestions for good related phrases.
If you have a current website, start by taking a look at your web statistics to find out what phrases your visitors are currently using to reach your website. (Hopefully you do have statistics that provide this information.)
Take this list to the keyword tools and do the same as above.
We could write an entire report all about keyword research and developing a comprehensive list of great keyword phrases but we don’t have time for that here. My best advice to you is to develop as big of a list as possible, staying on target to the purpose of your website and avoiding fluffy phrases that won’t bring you the target visitors you are looking for.
For example:
If you want to sell a work at home information product, create a long list of important techniques and how to relate phrases based on your research but leave out things like ‘free information products’ because this will bring you freebie seekers instead of shoppers. (Unless you do distribute free information products.)
Now, what to do with this huge list of keyword phrases?
Use them!
Now that we have a wonderful long list of often searched for keyword phrases, we need to make certain that we incorporate them into our website in a useful and natural way.
That means that we should be using them:
- in page titles
- in page headlines
- in our content
- in product descriptions
- in our sales copy
- to name page files
- to name graphics
What you do not want to do is to take one or two popular phrases and use them over and over and over again. That’s keyword stuffing that the search engines won’t like.
Instead, use one or two popular phrases a few (2 or 3) times on a page in as natural a fashion as possible. And then also incorporate a few of the other related phrases as well.
For example:
I sell affordable web graphic design and my keyword research has provided me with a great long list. These five phrases top the list:
- work at home web graphics
- small business website solutions
- affordable website design solutions
- affordable WAHM website solutions
- WAHM web graphics
If I were foolish I would spam the search engines by placing ‘Affordable WAHM Graphics’ in my content about ten times then use the same term in the title, header, page title and on the graphics too.
Not being foolish, instead, I use ‘WAHM web graphics’ a couple of times, then I also use ‘affordable web graphic solutions’ and ‘small business web graphic solutions’ as well.
Search engine strategy leaders teach us to create as many pages as possible for your website in order to adequately target all of your keyword phrases and to choose just one keyword phrase to optimize for on each page – but that doesn’t mean that you don’t use any other phrases at all.
Using your keywords in the content is simple, but how do you incorporate them everywhere else? This brings us into the code of our website.
If you’re building with html you’re going to do some simple things. When you create new pages, name the pages using the keyword phrase. (ie: affordable-WAHM-graphics.htm instead of affordablegraphics.htm or graphics1234.htm, etc.)
If you use a blog or some other content management system you’ll need to investigate what is necessary to make your page files keyword rich. Every tool is a bit different and most applications have some plugins or hacks that you can use to incorporate your desired keyword phrases.
Then you will give the page a title, this is done with the<title> Affordable Web Design Solutions for WAHM & Small Business </title>Then to incorporate a phrase in our headline, we’ll insert a headline font tag at the top of our page above our content like this:
<h2>Affordable Web Graphics</h2>Now take a look at any of the graphics you’re going to use on the page. Name them using a keyword phrase. (ie: affordable-web-graphics.jpg instead of graphicpic.jpg) Then you can also add a descriptive tag that will be read by the search engines and appear when a user rolls their mouse over the graphic. You might do something like this:
<img src=”/affordable-web-graphics.jpg” alt=”Affordable Web Graphics from This Mom’s Web Design”>Graphic tags are used for more than search engines; they’re used to tell visually challenged users what is on a web page. Software will actually read them the page, including the graphic tags so it is important that the tags be descriptive and useful, not just stuffed with boring phrases.






