Keyword Selection

Selecting the Right Keywords

May 23rd, 2007

To start off, I am cheap…really cheap. I hate paying for anything I figure I can learn and do myself – I won’t buy a hammer if I could find a rock that would be effective. So buying tools to find good keywords/phrases wasn’t happening. So I use this following method in keyword/phrase selection.

Keyword Selection Tutorial

1. I write down about 3 phrases, searches I think I would use during a search for the product/service/information I need words for.

2. I put those phrases into this Keyphrase Tool.

3. I Copy the results for terms that have searches occurring – at least one forth of the bar highlighted, ranking them from the most searched to the least. I don’t copy the whole list, most I have done in this step is about eight.

4. Put a term, one at a time, in Google search surrounded by quotes “key phrase”. I look for how many total results and the type of page that comes up number one. I just move to the next term if it is 100,000 and a .com’s index page figuring that term is too competitive to start out with (I file the term away for the future). If the term has pulled under 100,000 and the first page listed is not the index page I will check the incoming links to the landing page and the anchor text used. If the link number and quality is too high, keep moving to the next term repeating until the right balance of competition and searches occurring balance out.

5. Repeat these steps until you are satisfied!

6. Now that you have mined your golden keywords/phrases you are ready to design your page. A couple of tips – every page of your site needs a different title tag. Use only one h1 tag and utilize the h2, h3, h4 tags as they make sense. Great information can be found in this SEO Forum

You now have a beautiful and well optimized web page. Now you have to optimize “off page”. Using variances of the keyphrases you have “on page” in the anchor text build incoming links.

Keyword research/monitoring is a continuous process for building and maintaining your site. Tools like Hittail really only become useful if you have visitors coming in the first place – the method I use is for the initial determination of the words when starting from scratch. The hittail, longtail method is outstanding for raising the chick – the one I mention hatches the egg.