Choosing the Right Keyword Phrases to Use in Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Analysis involves assessing the words and phrases you think your target audience will use to find your website or the products and services you offer. It is a very valuable exercise that will help your Website:

• Attract more targeted visitors who are actually looking for what you offer.
• Rank more highly in search results that are relevant to your website.
• Reduce the number of non-targeted enquiries from people outside your target audience.

Keyword Research

The most important thing when selecting keywords is determining relevance. Your keywords must reflect your website offering. If you choose keywords that are irrelevant or inappropriate then the chances are that your website will never appear in Search Engine results pages as the Search Engines will simply deem your website irrelevant to a search query and will not display it. The Search Engines have matured to a point where the "optimised" areas of a website are not the only areas considered when applying ranking algorithms. The copy throughout your website is what the Search Engines 'read' to determine if it is relevant enough to be returned in search results regardless of the irrelevant/inappropriate keywords used in optimisation. If you have used irrelevant keywords and by some miracle your website is returned in the search results, normally due to very low competition, then what you'll be faced with is non-targeted visitors resulting in low to no conversion.

Assessing the Competition

The next most important issue is assessing the competition. You need to determine how many other websites are competing in the Search Engine indexes for the phrases that you have identified. It is all very well choosing highly searched phrases but if the number of competing websites is too great then the chances of your website appearing in the search results in the short term are very slim. As your website gains in popularity it becomes stronger in the indexes and more able to compete at a higher level, but this takes time.

The goal is to select the phrases that are popular via search volume but are not competing too heavily with other websites using the same phrases. This will give your website the very best chance of gaining rankings and receiving that much sought after targeted traffic.

The second factor in assessing the competition, is finding out the number and quality of inward links to your competitors websites. This is particularly important if other websites that you are competing against have been optimised. This value is called Link Popularity and is one of the major influencing factors when a Search Engine ranks a website in its search results.

Taking all of these factors into account, will provide you with the best possible phrases to use in optimisation of your website and should also give you an indication of success for particular phrases helping to set your expectation of when your site will begin to appear for those phrases.