How to Get the Right Keywords For SEO

For the beginner/intermediate SEO, I'd recommend using the free versions of Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery, as well as the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, to research phrases your potential web site visitors are searching for. If your budget or time commitment is low, choose the right keywords that reflect this. Don't go for the most popular single-word keywords that will take forever to rank well for. Look at some of the multi-word phrases (long tail keywords) and plug them into Google.

What do the results tell you? Well, you can get a general idea of how much a well-ranked site is optimized for that specific phrase. If the Wordtracker number on the phrase is low then there might be hardly any competitors actually optimizing pages for it. Do you see the phrase in its entirety in the page title of the top 5 sites on Google? What about in the actual copy of the page? Does this keyword show up in any anchor text within their site? Although the description meta tag is ignored by Google, is the phrase included in it?

Although AdWords data is based on Google's paid ad results and not organic search, sometimes the advertiser competition column in the AdWords Keyword Tool can help tell us how much a keyword is being optimized for by competitors.

At this point, I must ask that you have Google Analytics installed on your web site. There is no point in continuing with SEO if you don't have an accurate method of analyzing visitor data!

How many keywords should you choose per page? I get this question a lot. There's no specific answer as it should depend on the content of your page/site. But it is important to have landing pages on your site - pages that focus on specific keywords with the hopes of having them rank for searches instead of having all your visitors come to just your home page. In order to get the right number of keywords per page, realize what the page is about. If the page sells a product then let that product or brand name be the main keyword. There's no harm in having other keywords show up if, for example, specific models of your product are featured on the page too. Just don't get into the habit of combining two separate themes on a page. The most important thing to remember when choosing keywords and using them in your site copy is to keep your visitors in mind above all else, including search engines.

OK, finally you have focused your site content on some keywords that get some searches but don't come with a lot of competition. (I'm going to assume that you either have A] unique, quality content others would want to link to, or B] an active link building campaign designed to get others to link back. Rankings won't come without getting inbound links)

Provided you have the links covered, you're at the monitoring stage now. Keep a close eye on the traffic coming through keyword searches. It's likely that you'll start seeing many variations for your target keywords driving traffic to you. "Why didn't these keywords show up in Wordtracker?" you might be asking yourself. Some phrases don't get searched for enough with regularity and might not show up. Another reason is that Wordtracker gets their data from the big metacrawlers, not directly from Google. Search trends can be different across search platforms.

The great thing is that if you optimized a page for one keyword that had a daily search total of 20 according to Wordtracker, you might find that you're getting another 20, 40 or more daily searches from the total variations of that phrase. These indirect rankings are a good bonus. Analyzing these other phrases might also give you some insight into the language your potential customers use and how they search for your products.

Google Analytics provides some very helpful metrics. Average time on site and bounce rate are two very important ones. If you're finding that over the course of a month or more that some keywords are driving traffic to your site that have a much higher bounce rate, then you can assume your content is not relevant enough to what they're actually looking for. You can either re-focus your page content, or abandon that keyword altogether for another better-performing phrase.

Hopefully this article will help you get the right keywords for your SEO campaign and help to generate long-term traffic. With the right tools in place, there's no reason not to have highly-targeted traffic coming to your site for a very long time.