Chapter 3 - Determining Your Best Keywords
This is where your first and most important efforts begin. Do not skip the tasks in this chapter as they form the foundation of your entire effort. It is absolutely critical that you research and determine the most important and relevant keywords for your website.
Time spent upfront in this endeavor will reap great rewards later. If you fail to complete this important step, your chance for a top 10 ranking is greatly diminished. The importance of this cannot be stressed enough!
So What Exactly Are Keywords?
In the context of the Web, a keyword is a term that a person enters into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consists of between two and five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query phrases, or just keywords, but they all generally mean the same thing.
Your most important keywords are those best and most relevant search phrases you want your website listing to be found for on a search results page. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive. It is better to have 100 highly-qualified visitors who find your site listed in Google under a specific and particular search phrase than to have 1,000 visitors who find your site listed under a generic search phrase and then aren’t that interested in what you offer once they get to your site.
Important: Your ultimate objective shouldn’t be just to get lots of traffic to your site (although this is important), but instead should be to get a high sales conversion. Having a #1 listing in Google means nothing unless you can convert visitors to your website into satisfied, repeat, paying customers.
The more targeted, the more specific, the more unique your chosen keywords are, the greater the chance that visitors to your site will find what they are looking for. You want a high “click-to-sales” or high “visitors-to-customers” ratio. As such, you need to start thinking like your customers. Determine what it is that they need, what problems they have, and what solutions you can offer to help them.
So how do you determine which keywords are most important and relevant for your website? There are two main methods, as follows:
1. By using an online tool called WordTracker at http://wvw.wordtracker.com. Do this first and spend time doing it right.
2. By analyzing your website traffic statistics. Do this later over time to validate the results of method 1.
WordTracker is an online tool that finds all possible variations and permutations of search phrases, including synonyms and common misspellings that people have actually entered into search engines to find sites similar to yours. In addition, it will also tell you how many people have actually used that particular search term over the last 60 days and over the last 24 hours. There is no other program currently available that offers this much information. Yes, there are other tools out there, like Overture’s or AdWord’s Keyword Suggestion tools, but they simply aren’t as accurate or as good. For this reason, it is the tool of choice for many search engine optimizers (SEOs) and Internet marketers. Indeed, WordTracker has been one of the better-kept secrets around for increasing traffic to websites by finding out the search habits of people on the Internet.
In addition, you should also make a habit of viewing your site traffic statistics to find out which keywords people are using to find your site. This is usually done after your site has been in operation for a while, and is useful for verifying and validating your WordTracker results. For more information, see Monitoring Your Traffic.
Using WordTracker
Before you use WordTracker, you should first brainstorm and make a list of all possible words and phrases that you think a customer may use to find those products, services, or information that you are offering on your site. Don’t include industry jargon, acronyms, or buzzwords that only experts in your industry or marketers would know. Think like your customer. This is an important distinction to keep in mind.
WordTracker offers both a free trial version and a paid (full) version. You will need to sign up for the full version of WordTracker to be able to find search terms that people have searched for using Google. The free trial of WordTracker only allows you to find keywords people have searched for using the AltaVista search engine.
WordTracker is quite inexpensive to use, and there simply is no better way to research the best keywords to use for your website. In fact, you can use it to estimate beforehand how much traffic you can potentially expect to receive so it is an invaluable tool for general business research as well.
You should first use the trial version to learn how to use WordTracker effectively. Go through the Online Tour and read through the online manual. This is time well spent!
Here are a couple of screenshots in WordTracker to aid in following the procedure:
Because some people may find WordTracker a little tricky to use at first, here is the actual step-by-step procedure for using this tool:
Using WordTracker step-by-step
1. After signing up for the full version, click Login from the home page.
2. Under Keyword Universe, click Here.
3. Under Step 2, type in what you think is your best phrase overall, and then click Proceed. Leave all other settings as is. 4. On the left pane, scroll down to see the list of related synonyms that WordTracker has returned. You will likely find terms and phrases that you may not have thought of. Jot down the most interesting ones - you will want to add these later on.
5. Click the first phrase in the list (the one you entered in Step 3).
6. In the right-hand pane, you will see a list of related phrases. Click on those that you believe are the best. They are then added to your “cart”.
These are the actual search phrases that people have been entered into search engines over the last 60 days, along with how many times each was used.
7. Go back to the left pane and repeat steps 4 through 6, adding as many phrases as you feel are needed. These phrases will be analyzed later on by WordTracker.
Tip: You can also import keywords into WordTracker that you have in a .txt file. Copy and paste your keywords into the Use your own box in the right pane and then click Go. Each keyword must be on a separate line.
Alternatively, you can also import keywords into an unused project from the Projects link on their home page.
8. When finished, click Click here for step 3.
9. Under Step 3, look at those terms at the bottom of the list that have very low numbers in the Count column, as compared to the terms at the top. Click Delete for each low-count term you want to remove, and then click Competition Search.
10. Under Step 4. select the Google check box, and then click Proceed. WordTracker will now analyze these terms to see how many times they were entered during search requests using Google.
11. When WordTracker is finished, scroll down the page and study the list, paying particular attention to the KEI Analysis column. KEI is very important - a high value represents those keywords that are most popular in Google AND that are used on the least number of other websites. Put another way, you want to look at those keywords that have the highest number in the Count column and the lowest numbers in the Competing column.
You should also have several other phrases that represent more specific or refined variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase. These phrases will be used on your specific product, service, or content pages.
For example, let’s use a website that sells house plans online:
Primary Keyword Phrase: “house plans”
Specific variations: “country house plans”
“luxury house plans”
“Cape Cod house plans”
Notice how the Primary Keyword Phrase is contained within the more specific phrases? This is the ideal situation to achieve.
Do not try to go after generic keywords or single words. How difficult do you think it would be to get a top ranking for, say “computers”? You’d be competing with over 52 million other web pages!
If your site is comprised of totally separate categories of products or services (such as baby diapers and garage door openers for example), or if you sell to completely different bases of customers, you should consider splitting your website into multiple sites, with each site containing one category. For more information on this, see Creating Multiple Sites.
What are your Secondary Keyword Phrases?
After using WordTracker, you should also have a list of phrases that do not have as high of a KEI rating as your Primary Keyword Phrase but are nonetheless also relevant. These are your Secondary Keyword Phrases that, while also highly relevant to your website or business, are not searched on as frequently as your Primary Keyword Phrase.
Using the example above, here are some Secondary Keyword Phrases for house plans using WordTracker:
Secondary Keyword Phrases: “home plans”
“home designs”
“houseplans”
Secondary Keyword Phrases should also be used on your site, just not as frequently as your Primary Keyword Phrase.
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