Note 231 – Research tools and keyword phrases

There are many tools out there that you can use to find out how popular a certain word or phrase is.  Your goal when thinking about keywords or keyword phrases is to make sure they relate to the products and services on your site. Here are a few tips to help you:

1. Try and think of what your site gives people; what they might be asking for.  Any words that come to mind would be useful here. 
2. Imagine that you trying to explain to someone what your site does, but you can only use a few words. 
3. Ask yourself the question ‘what is in it for the reader?’.  You are creating content for their benefit not yours.  It helps if you deliver what you say you are going to deliver.   
4. According to a report by Brian Clark called How to create compelling content (mentioned in his Copyblogger.com article Smart People SEO), search engines don’t like you to have a keyword density of more than 5.5% , so don’t swamp your article or page with too many of them.  If you do, you may get the opposite result and not be ranked at all.
5. The description that people see about your page in the search results is called the meta description, which needs to be less than 165 characters if you want the reader to see the whole thing.  This is a good place to put your keywords.
6. Make it relevant – it’s not just about creating great keywords, the next step is to actually make sure that your content reflects and explains these keywords.  Don’t just use them all in your first paragraph or title and then make the content about something different – the visitor will feel cheated.

Brian Clark also came up with this formula: CONTENT +  PROMOTION = LINKS and explains that:

“the words you put on a web page have no life of their own until they get read. And those same words will not gain prominence in search engines until the words are linked to by relevant, authoritative sources”.

Research tools to use

Google AdWords has a keyword tool which allows you to type in keywords or phrases to see if there is low, medium or high competition for them.  For example, there is a medium competition for the keyword phrase SEO Copywriter with the number of global monthly searches being 18,100, whereas the word SEO (which also has a medium competition) has a much higher global monthly search of 11.100,000.

Just below the search results for the above, it automatically shows other related keyword ideas, for example, there is a high competition for the key words phrase ‘top SEO companies’ with a global monthly search of 22,100.  The benefit of this is that you don’t need to keep typing different phrases in, just glance down the list for suggested keyword phrases to use.

It would imagine that it takes a lot of playing around to get the right phrases, but it’s worth it so that you don’t end up on the last page of a list of 11.1 million results as no one will find you!  Have fun with the tool!

Think of many keyword phrases

Imagine this scenario – you find the perfect keyword phrases and include them in your overall page, title or post.  This turns out to be so competitive that you will never be able to reach your audience using these words.  Try and have some other keyword phrases up your sleeve that can be used to direct people to your site – don’t keep using the same ones.

Hope you enjoyed today’s blog.  If you have any other tips on this subject that you would like to share or you have been successful with your keyword phrases, please leave me a comment. 

Also a big thank you to all my readers for your continued support – my ‘blog stats’ total broke through the 5000 barrier yesterday!

Until tomorrow…

Sandra
www.sandramadeira.com

Related articles

• What are keywords and why are they important for SEO? (marketing.yell.com)
• Note 229 – The difference between SEO and social media (mywritingnotebook.wordpress.com)