SEO Tips: Find Keyword Phrases to Target on Your Website

Introduction:

In this blog post I will provide simple instructions for finding the right keywords to focus your SEO efforts on targeting.  Search Engine Optimization or SEO is simply getting the search engines to give you high rankings for certain keyword phrases.  Since ranking higher is directly related to getting more website traffic, everyone wants their website to rank higher in the search engines.

Which Keywords Should I Target:

Since no website can rank highly for every keyword, the question is: which keywords should you try to get high search engine rankings for?  The answer to this question is that you want to have high search engine rankings for keyword phrases that are:

1. Highly Relevant - the keyword phrases very specifically and unambiguously describe your products/services (this is the most important factor).
2. Highly Popular - the keyword phrases have a high search volume because a lot of people type these specific phrases into the search engines
3. Low Competition - not a lot of websites are trying to target these keywords.

Step By Step Instructions for Choosing the Right Keywords to Target:

Step 1: Go to Google's free keyword tool by clicking here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Step 2: Type in a general 1 or 2 word phrase that describes your product/service and then click "Get keyword ideas".  For this example we'll assume the role of a kayak website.

Step 3: Scroll through the list of keyword ideas and click the "csv (for excel)" link.

Step 4: Sort and Delete in Excel.  The goal of this step is to get rid of the high competition keywords and the low volume keywords.

1. Sort the second column ("Advertiser Competition") from largest to smallest and delete the rows containing the keywords with a competition rating above 80% a/k/a .8
2. Now sort the fourth column ("Global Monthly Search Volume") from largest to smallest and delete the rows containing the keywords with search volume below 1,000.
3. NOTE: I've just randomly selected the benchmarks of 80% and 1,000 and these are by no means scientific numbers set in stone - use whatever cutoffs seem best for your business based on the keyword data you see in following these steps.  You may even decide to make exceptions to whatever cutoffs you end up using for extremely relevant keywords that you want to compete for even if they are high competition or low search volume keywords.
4. What you're left with is a list of keywords that have reasonably high search volume but are not overly competitive.  But you're not done yet - remember the relevance factor defined above.  Now go through the list and delete any keywords that aren't directly, specifically and unambiguously related to your products/services.

Step 5: Repeat the above steps using different keywords in step 2 to get new keyword ideas from Google's handy and free keyword tool.  Keep whittling your list of relevant, highly searched and low competition keywords down until you have a good but manageable list of keywords to target. 

Step 6: Optimize for Search (SEO).  Now that you have a list of keyword phrases to target, it's just a matter of deciding which pages on your website should strategically target these keyword phrases.  If no pages exist in which to target a certain keyword phrase then go ahead and create a new page or even a whole new section of your website.  There are a lot of advanced SEO techniques for effectively targeting these keywords but you can see a big search engine ranking increase from just following the 3 simple SEO suggestions below:

1. For each specific page select 2-3 keyword phrases to target on that page
2. Place each keyword phrase 2-3 times on the page.
3. Place the most important keyword phrase at the very beginning of the title tag for that page and in the header tags of the page.
4. NOTE: Search engines are not the only visitors to your website, so don't make the foolish mistake of only writing for search engines and ignoring your human audience.  Don't insert a bunch of keyword phrases into your page at the expense of your message.  After all, what's the point of getting a lot of search engine traffic if the visitors aren't going to connect with your content and become a customer?  If done correctly and naturally, good SEO does not need to come at the expense of effectively conveying your message to your target audience.

Conclusion:

Remember, you're looking for keyword phrases that are relevant, are highly searched and have low competition, and the most important of these factors is relevance.  Once you find a list of keyword phrases to target, assign 2-3 of them to a single page and place them 2-3 times on the page with a specific emphasis the first few words in the title tag and in the header tags.