Keyword Research is by far the most important aspect in any Search Engine Optimisation initiative. Keyword Phrase Research is a process of selecting the “optimum� keyword phrases that will bring relevant visitors to your site. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords (i.e. if you are an Irish law firm, do you want to target people who search for “Attorney� or people who search for “Litigation and Dispute Resolution Ireland�?).
The keyword research phase will consist of i) discovering keyphrases, ii) analysing keyphrases, iii) selecting keyphrases and iv) deploying keyphrases.
The discovering keyphrases phase will consist of combining existing keyphrases with ones gleaned from the site logs, competitors websites, and the target audience review and analysing them using tools like WordTracker and Overture to expand the list to include all possibilities.
In the keyword analysis and selection phases the keyword list will be refined based on factors like competition for particular phrases and PageRank to produce a focused list of 15-20 keyphrases.
Focused key phrases not only give your site a better chance to rank, they deliver highly targeted traffic resulting in higher traffic to client conversion ratios.
The keywords should be deployed on the site carefully to maximise their effectiveness (positioning the keywords optimally on the page, making use of H1 tags, etc.) while avoiding over-repetition of keywords on a page (might be interpreted as spam by the search engines). Also, devising individual customized keyphrase strategies for each page on your site will be vital to your project’s success – to this end, ensure you include your keyphrases in your page titles and page descriptions.
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Optimisation –> Optimization
Thanks for stopping by and commenting Rob. In Ireland (where I am based) it is spelt with an “s” not a “z”.
The “z” spelling is US English.
Choosing the right keywords is definitely key to getting targted traffic that actually converts to sales. Do not choose keywords you *think* are best without first using a keyword tool to examine all relevant possibilities.
In addition to the h1 elements the keywords and key phrases should also be used in the title element of each page.
Keywords in title and anchor text are very important.
Mary I agree with You they are very important!
An excellent piece of advice! Keyword research is actually something that interests me a lot. Try searching Google for “Do you make these top 10 mistakes in keyword research” – you will find some additional tips that may be helpful
Me also agree with the term keyword research, its a main part of on page optimization.
i am having doubt between keyword and keyphrases… i mean what is the difference between keyword and keyphrases..?
can anybody tell me what exactly this mean…
I think Tom mean it the same. its just keyword for mean is a single word and keyphases is a group of words. I’m not really sure though. Just guessing..
Excellent post!
Why not adding some useful tools for keyword research to what you have just listed?
I usually work with wordtracker (like you do) but lately I have found Adwords Keyword Tool very interesting and, most importantly it’s free (I agreed with you here too…).
However even before looking for keywords there is some research that needs to be done and I have found a great tool for keyword research to uncover “seed” words;
It’s called Keyword Search Engine and it does the following:
Generate a list of power keywords for Google Adwords or Keyword Research.
Follow the directions on the right for instructions on to use these generated keywords to estimate the Supply and Demand of a particular clusters / segments of a market.
http://www.covertsem.com/tools/keyword-research-engine/
enjoy!
Tom,
Excellent post. I think tracking how traffic from a certain keyword converts is also extremely important. We have one keyword that we rank first for it on Google. That keyword generates about 4 visits a month with a 75% conversion rate. Not a bad deal at all!
not only title and anchor, the next important thing is h1 h2 titles. Big G and Big Y like sorted content, each page alike sorted.