If you’re really serious about your SEO efforts, then you need to know exactly which words people will type into the search engines when looking for products and services similar to the ones you are selling. These are called keywords, and they are the focal point of most SEO. Now, you probably already know that one of the most important ways to drive traffic to your website is by getting plenty of inbound links. Since the search engines reward websites with multiple inbound links from relevant, authoritative websites, it’s in your best interest to get as many links to your site as possible. Even more important, however, is getting inbound links that contain the keywords for which you have optimized your pages.
For the sake of example, we’ll pretend that your website is about unicycles. You build unicycles, repair unicycles, and teach people how to ride them. You’ll probably have a difficult time getting a high ranking for a search that only uses the word unicycles. But if you can figure out other that people use to search for the products and services that you offer, then you probably have a chance of getting high rankings for those. Here are the next steps you should take in your SEO keyword efforts:
1. Narrow down your keywords. There are several great tools available for doing keyword research. Pick your favorite and type in the keyword around which you plan to optimize your page. In just seconds you’ll see a whole list of the words and phrases that people use most often to find products or services like the ones you offer.
2. Find Successful Keywords. Google’s Adwords tool is great for this. When you type a keyword into the box and press Enter, you’ll end up with a whole list of keywords that are related to the one that you typed in. You’ll also get a whole list of other keywords that might work for you. You’ll see little bars under the heading of Advertiser Competition. Pick one or two words whose bars are less than half green. Those are the words that have less competition that the ones whose bars are mostly green.
3. Check out the Competition. Once you’ve found two or three keywords and phrases in the previous step, go to Google and type in: inanchor:“the keyword I just picked.” All the pages that you see are those with whom you would be in competition for the keyword or phrase that you just chose. You’ll notice that the list is much shorter than the list you saw when you just typed in unicycles.
4. Build Your Backlinks. Once you’ve chosen your keywords and optimized your pages around those keywords, it’s time to build some backlinks, another very important SEO task. Much has been written on effective ways to build backlins, but three of the most obvious are including a link to your webpage in your signature file and then posting to forums that are related to your product or service, commenting on blogs and leaving a link back to your webpage, and engaging in article marketing strategies.
Keyword research is one of the most important SEO tasks that you will undertake, so be careful that you don’t give it short shrift. And if you’re really serious about SEO, then consider consulting with an internet marketing expert to discuss the keyword research that you’ve done and to get pointers on optimizing your pages around your chosen keywords. These professionals can also help you build quality backlinks to your site, which will results in higher search engine rankings and therefore more traffic to your site. When you see what a different a little keyword research can make in the success of your business, you’ll wonder why you hadn’t done it sooner!
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