Keyword Research Tips For SEO

If a website’s organic ranking is low, the websites’ manager should be checking to see if the site needs some SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Keyword choices are one of the most important part of the SEO investigation. If content is King then keywords are the King’s advisors. Highly ranked keywords are essential to the success of a website. There are many ways to research keywords, through sites on the Internet to purchased software. How does one pick and choose? Here are some keyword research tips that hopefully, will be helpful.

Keywords are the word, words or phrases that a user types into a search engine to find what they are looking for. These are called “search queries.” Finding out how popular a keyword is for a business involves researching the keywords a business wants to use. How to do this?

There are some excellent keyword tools on the Net. Some are free and some are not. Wordtracker has been around for a long time is highly touted by its users. There are many others like Discovery, WordZe, Google Keyword Tool, SEO Digger, SEO Book, Adgooroo and more. It’s best to ask your colleagues what they have found to be useful. Word of mouth in the Web business is worth a lot because it is based on a person’s actual experience.

These sites give instructions on how to use their tool and specify what benefits their particular have to offer. Some of these sites really do go about researching keywords differently so it’s a good idea to surf and read to make sure it will give you what you need.

There are a lot of elements that go into giving a website a high SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking. This is where content is King. Content has to be relevant and the keyword is very essential for relevancy. Let’s say the site is selling “ski jackets. A keyword research tool shows the words “winter coats” to be searched more frequently than “ski jackets.” Both are indeed outerwear but relevancy is lost if “winter coats” is used instead of “ski jackets.” The search engine robots will search and find a lack of specific relevancy and the site will rank lower on the SERP.

Another area one must avoid is something called “keyword stuffing.” To continue the above example, let’s say “ski jackets” gets searched a lot. Put back on the reins and be sure not to overuse these words. Many search engines will think the site is spam and the site will suffer terribly. It’s recommended to keep the keyword(s) under three percent and to place them in important places like the meta tag, meta title, article title, first paragraph, outgoing links and image title.

With these keyword research tips, it should be possible to begin optimizing a website. There is a vast amount of information on the Internet explaining in more detail how to go about it. Don’t let the jargon be intimidating. Just jump right in.

By: James W Curtis

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