Choosing keywords is not an easy task and must be approached with
much care. If you are planning on relying on search engines to generate
traffic and visitors it is essential that you are targeting the right
keywords and keyphrases for your target marketing, otherwise people may
be landing on your site who are looking for something completely
different. It is a common belief that most website traffic will come
from a handful of 2-3 word phrases. But if a website has a lot of good
information and is content rich, then traffic can be generated from
hundreds of search terms, many 4+ words in length (commonly called
long-tail search terms).
Choosing the right keywords
So forgetting about long-tail searches for the time being, it is best
to choose phrases that are around 2-4 words and accurately describe
your website’s offerings in general everyday language that people are
most likely to search. One thing you must bear in mind is how
competitive those keywords are. If your keywords are very general and
not targeted enough, then it is likely that they will be too competitive
and ranking on the first page will be very difficult. Even if you do
rank well for a competitive search term, it is quite likely that your
traffic may not convert as people are very often searching for something
specific. But do consider that if your keywords are too specific your
site will be harder to find, resulting in fewer visitors to your site
through search engines.
A good tool to use for researching your keywords is the Google AdWords Tool.
You can type in your desired keywords and the tool will tell you how
competitive they are and how many searches a month they receive.
Remember that search engines rank pages, not whole websites, so you
needto target different keywords on different pages and not the same
keywords on all pages. You might go for a more general term on your home page, and more specific terms on sub pages.
Common mistakes when selecting keywords:
- Targeting single words
- Targeting road terms
- Targeting specialised terms
- Targeting unpopular terms
- Targeting competitive terms
Implementing your keywords
Generally search engines will pick up your site’s keywords and
keyphrases from your page’s title, meta description and the actual
content on the page. Some search engines still use meta keywords as a
ranking factor, but due to keywords stuffing search engines have noted
them as being less trustworthy.
You must ensure that you do not overuse your keywords on either your
page title, meta description or your content. This could be seen as
spamming to the search engines and may result in your website being
penalised and hurt your rankings. Your content must be seen to read
naturally, and not be stuffed with keywords for the purpose of SEO.
Search engines want your website and its content to be created for the
benefit of the visitor, so must be interesting, informative and not
spammy!
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