The answer is keyword choice.
Keywords (also referred to as keyword phrases and keyphrases) are the short, descriptive phrases that you want to be found with on the search engines.
The authors of Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day provide excellent strategies for choosing the right keywords.
Here are some of their tips…
Use these triggers and questions to create your list:
- What is your business or organization’s name?
- Imagine you are a member of your target audience, what do you type in the search box?
- What are your products or services? What information do you offer?
- What need do you fill for your target audience?
- Think seasonal. Does your product or service vary from season to season? Do you offer special services for special events?
- Are there common misspellings, alternate spellings and regional variations on your keywords?
- Where is your business located? What variations could you include (for example, include OH and Ohio)?
Expand the list by checking…
…with your coworkers who can provide new perspectives and ideas
…your website for terms you are currently using
…industry media for terminology and hot phrases
…website statistics for terms people are already using to find your site
…with your customers. Salespeople are great resources and can tell you what terms customers use to describe your services.
…with friends and neighbors. Businesses are often blinded by insider terminology they use to describe themselves.
…competitors websites
This list will help you to begin creating your list. The next step is to assess the search popularity, relevance and competition level to develop a manageable list of 10 target keywords.
I’ll provide you with some tips to do that in coming weeks, but if you don’t want to wait, pick up the book. You won’t regret it, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Cou7zin.
Enjoy brainstorming!
There are several free and paid keyword research tools on the market. An extremely easy one to use is Google Suggest. Type in the words you think someone might use to search for your website, article or blog and look at the stats that appear. You will see the commonly searched phrases and a number that represents the phrase’s relative popularity.
Here’s how Google describes its service:
Search term suggestions on Google.com are powered by the Google Suggest service. Google Suggest communicates with Google while you type in order to offer suggestions to you. All the information you send to Google — such as searches you type or ones you select in Google Suggest — is protected by Google’s privacy policy. When providing suggestions, Google Suggest doesn’t refer to anyone’s personal searches; it uses information about the relative popularity of common searches to rank its suggestions.
In the example below, there are a lot of people searching for keyword elite software. However, for this post, I am writing about keyword research tools. You can see that “keyword research tool” was not as popular as the phrase “keyword tool,” so I chose to use “keyword tool” for the title instead of “keyword research tool,” but included “keyword research tool” in the body of the post.
Again, there are many more sophisticated keyword research tools on the market, both free and paid, but Google Suggest is a quick way to make decisions on the fly without risking being sucked in by analysis paralysis.
Tell me about your experience using this tool or other keyword research tools.
