Keyword Research part III
Step
3: Selection of Keyword Phrases
If you have followed the above process of Discovering
and Analyzing
keywords, you probably have between 50-100 keyword phrases
that qualify as “high-yield” given your site’s
current PR
range. Sorting out which keywords you’re going to gun
for, out of the corpus of keywords you have identified is
a crucial task. Selection of keyword phrases pertains to finding
the most valuable
keyword phrases that most accurately describe specific
qualities of your website. Though generic keywords are generally
searched more, ranking with generic key phrases often brings
mediocre Return on Traffic.
Focused Key Phrases
As you may have realized by now the focused
key phrases not only give your site a better chance to
rank, it gets highly targeted traffic resulting in higher
traffic to sales conversion ratios. Since you have used a
process, which ensures that you are working with popular keywords,
ranking with any of the short listed keywords assures you
of incoming traffic. Amongst the 100 odd keywords you have
short-listed, keep your eyes on the ones that have a tight
focus on what your site’s offering within the parameters
of ranking possibilities and competitiveness.
Final Selection of Keyword Phrases
For making your final selection of 15-20 most relevant keywords,
we recommend working in the following method:
 |
Eliminate the keywords, which
are difficult to rank with considering the chart given
for PR
vs. Competition. |
| |
Eliminate very low popularity Keywords where
the search traffic for the terms is very low. |
| |
Out of the balance keywords that qualify
for ranking with your site’s current PR,
select the most popular keywords, which have the right
focus for your site. |
Step 4: Deploying
Keyword Phrases
After you have made a final selection of 15-20 of your most
relevant and important keywords, you need to use them on different
parts of your website.
It is not advisable to use all your keywords on all the pages.
A good way to use the selected keywords on your site is to
divide them into 5-7 groups of keywords. Each group should
have closely related keyword-forming themes. Identify various
sections/ parts of your website that closely match with the
keyword group themes and optimize your pages using these themes.
Keywords can be used in several portions/ codes of your web
pages. The important aspects are listed below:
- Keywords Per Page
We recommend using your keywords 2-4 times per page. Over-repetition
of keywords on a page might be interpreted as spam by the
search engines. Make sure you don’t put all your keywords
on one page.
- Where to use the Keywords?
Your important keywords can be used in the following:
Title
Tag: A Title Tag of about 90 characters,
inclusive of your most important keywords is good enough.
For instance, the Title Tag of this article would be written
as “Keyword Research : Techniques
for keyword research, keyword analysis & keyword optimization”.
Read our detailed article on Title
Tag Optimization.
Meta
Description Tag: You should write a Meta
Description Tag of about 250 characters with your important
keywords. Be careful about over-repetition. For instance,
the Description tag of this article would be written as:
“Keyword research described:
Learn all about keyword research, keyword analysis, keyword
optimization and marketing keyword research.”
Read our detailed article on Meta
Description Tag Optimization.
Headlines: Keyword rich headlines and
sub-headings placed in <H1> and <H2> tags,
not only give a brief preview of what follows in the body
copy, but also pass the most relevant information on the
page or the subsequent paragraph. For instance, heading
of this article reads: Keyword Research
for Search Engine Optimization; followed by a sub-heading:
Importance of Keyword Research for
Search Engine Optimization
Body Text: Headlines in <H1> and
<H2> Tags followed by keyword
rich body text can improve your ranking chances.
Alt text / Alt Tag: Important keywords
can be used in the text that appears when you bring your
mouse over an image on a web page.
Title Attributes: The title attributes,
are short descriptions for the hyperlinks telling the
users about the content of the landing page. Make use
of your important keywords here.
Anchor
Text: The words that appear
within the hyperlinked portion of the text are called
Anchor Text. Keywords appearing in the Anchor Text have
a high relevance weight in Search Engines. Read our detailed
article on Anchor
Text Optimization.
File Name: your page’s file name
or URL also makes use of the most important keyword. For
example, file name for this article reads:
http://www.seorank.com/keyword-research-article.htm
Table Summary: The table summary in
HTML code describes the content of each HTML table in
your code. Though not visible to a user, it is important
for people with disabilities and text to speech applications.
It is an important place to use your keyword phrases.
- Copy Changes
Given below are a few tips for writing keyword
rich copy. For detailed information, refer to our article
on Search
Engine Copywriting.
Keeping your keyword phrases in mind, you might need
to make certain changes in the copy of your web page.
Therefore, instead of just writing (taking the Dentist
example) ‘This procedure involves…’
one should try and include their keywords by writing ‘
Root Canal Treatment involves…’
It is important to include both the singular and plural
versions of your keywords as most search engines return
different sets of results for plural and singular forms
of the same word.
Major search engines like Google are not case sensitive.
Therefore, headlines and sub-headings can be written in
upper or lower case or a combination of both, as it makes
no difference in your search engine rankings.
Spelling variations of the same word is another thing
you should look out for. Try to include all different
forms of the same word that can be spelled differently
or commonly mis-spelt. For instance, you can write, ‘
Abscessed Tooth, (commonly written as Absessed tooth)
is …’, thus smartly covering the mis-spelling
without giving the user a feeling that the site owner
does not know the correct spellings.
- Avoiding Pitfalls
Don’t get swayed by the Keyword Density formula many
SEO experts profess, it’s just over hyped. Though
you may find a number of articles written on the importance
of keyword density, we don’t think it is mission critical.
Write your language naturally while leveraging higher use
of the keywords in places where it can be used, like substituting
keywords in places of articles like ‘it’, ‘this’,
etc.
The Title
or the Description
of your web page should not read like a thesaurus or a collection
of keywords, but should be descriptive and enticing enough
to make a user click on it and read further. It is important
to note that our findings on user behavior have proved that
sometimes a site ranking number 5th in Search Engines has
drawn more clicks than a poorly titled site ranking number
1 in SERP. For instance, instead of simply writing ‘wisdom
tooth extraction’, a title that reads ‘painless
wisdom tooth extraction’ which is inclusive of your
USP would result in enticing more users to click on your
entry.
Place your keywords throughout the page, rather than just
at the top, but be very very careful about over-repetition,
as search engines would consider that as Spamming.
The whole idea behind the Keyword Research exercise is traffic
optimization, not traffic maximization. In a nutshell,
a good Keyword
Research helps in bringing qualified traffic to your site
that leads to high sales conversions, by being focused and
targeting specific search terms.
About the Author: Harjot
Kaleka is an SEO Copywriter at
www.SEOrank.com, a leading Search Engine Optimization
services company. She has a Masters degree in Mass
Communications and Copywriting.
