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The Basic Keyword Strategy

It is not an understatement to say that the success and/or failure of your website lies, in part, on selecting the right keywords (those small, two to five word terms and phrases which your potential customers search for on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN).  After all, when we talk about a site ranking well in the search engines what we really mean is that your site ranks well in the search engines for a particular keyword phrase.  Choose the right keywords and you can find yourself with top ratings on the search engines and a steady stream of free, targeted traffic. Choose the wrong keywords and you can find yourself wasting your time, money and effort with nothing but a headache to show for it. 

The reason why keywords are so important is because they are what connects you with your customers (at least in regards to the search engines).  After all, your customers use keywords to try and find your products or services online.  Clearly, then, it is worthwhile discovering (and optimizing your site for) those keywords which your customers are using.  In order to do that, it is important to have an effective keyword strategy. 

An effective keyword strategy involves understanding what it is that we are looking for in a keyword and how to go about finding those keywords.  In short, you want to find what we call Valuable Keywords, these are terms and phrases which, when properly optimized for, drive large volumes of targeted traffic to your website.  Finding these Valuable Keywords involves using various methods and tools which aide us in building up a large keyword list.

What are Valuable Keywords?
You should note that not all keywords are equally valuable when it comes to optimizing your site for the search engines.   Some keywords are more popular, some less so.  Some keywords are more competitive, some less so.  And so on.  Determining the value (or profitability) of a keyword is the key (no pun intended) to determining whether or not it is worth optimizing your site for that keyword.  Or, to be more exact, whether or not you should optimize your site for a keyword now, later, or never. 

The value of your keywords is determined by answering the following four questions: 

1. Does the keyword relate to your products or services?
   The goal of internet marketing in general, and search engine optimization in particular, is to direct targeted traffic to your website.  As such, you need to find those keywords which relate directly to your products or services.  For instance, if you are selling home insurance then you don’t want to target the keyword "home" which is too broad for the product that you are selling.  Rather, you would want to focus on keywords such as "home insurance quote", "home insurance rate", etc., as they relate directly to the services that you offer.
    
2. Why are your customers searching for any particular keyword?
   People have different reasons for searching for particular terms or phrases online.  Sometimes they seek information, other times they are browsing, and sometimes they are actively looking to buy a product or service.  It is important to prioritize your optimization campaign according to these motivations, first optimization for "buying" keywords and later on optimization for other, related keywords.  As such you need to be able to identify and organize your keywords according to the most likely motivation(s) that people have for searching for your keywords.
    
3. How much competition is there for your keywords?
   Some keywords are more difficult to optimize for than others.  Knowing which keywords you can compete for and which one’s you can’t compete for can often times make the difference between a successful search optimization campaign and a failed one.
     
4. How popular are your keywords?
   Not all keywords are as popular among your (potential) customers as others. Obviously, you want to target the most popular, relevant keywords which you can reasonably compete for. 
    

How to find profitable keywords
Asking the above questions is rather easy, finding answers to those questions takes a bit more skill.  A strategy that we find helpful, and which we will outline in these tutorials, is to build as large a keyword list as possible and organize that list according to popularity, competitiveness, relevancy and customer motivations.  Such a keyword list will prove invaluable as it will help to focus your optimization efforts on those keywords which you have a chance to rank well for and which you want to rank well for.  What’s more, this list sets the stage for future optimization campaigns.  Once you have successfully optimized your site for a set of relevant keywords, your site is in a better position to compete for more difficult keywords.  In other words, as a site builds more quality inbound links and as the search engines start to crawl the site more and more frequently that site builds "search" momentum which it can use to compete for more and more competitive keyword phrases.  As such, organizing your keyword list according to the competitiveness of your keywords allows you to map out an effective keyword strategy wherein you are constantly optimizing your site for keywords which you can compete for by progressively tackling more competitiveness keywords. 

General Strategy
This, then, is the general strategy that one has to take to build a quality list of relevant keywords.  It is now time for the specifics, both of what kind of keywords you are looking for and how to find them.  And that is what the following tutorials will explore, the details that go into implementing our keyword strategy.

Next tutorial:  Relevant Keywords and Customer Motivation
Previous tutorial: SEO Friendly URLs

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.