PART 2 — Finding the Right Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Updated May 26, 2011 Posted by Blue Coast Web

If you're planning on doing any online marketing your web site, product, or service, OR if you would like people to find you through natural search results, then Idenitifying the right keyword phrases is your first and most important step.

 

You'll want to identify the keywords that will actually lead to conversions - not just additional hits to your site. Quality keywords means quality visitors.

1. Start with a list of keywords - even if they are "hunches" about what you think your potential customers will be searching for. 
2. Then you'll want to do some research on those keywords. Perfect keyword phrase (other than being relevant to your offering) would be one that has a relatively high volume of searches, with a low competition (number of companies that are trying to market that keyword phrase through something like Google AdWords). The result of these two factors roughly indicates how diffcult it will be to market or optimize that keyword, and therefore how much effort you'll want to focus on it in your optimization.

Remember: the most important focus of your keyword should be relevance. What do you think your users will be searching on to find your offering?

Here are some resources to get started with:

1. Google's keyword tool
2. Google Analytics (if you don't have this free service on your site yet, you should!)
3. Google Webmaster Tools (are you seeing a trend here?!)
4. Keyword difficulty tool
5. Backlink checker

Read our next article in the series, titlesd "Part 3: Internal Site Optimization" (coming shortly!)