HillSiteDesigns.com Owners Corner

Tutorial Skill Level: Intermediate

Words to know

1.SEO   2.keywords  3.search engine   4.demographic(s)   5.KEI   6.sales copy   7.content   8.conversion

In the first part of this series, “Exploring SEO, (without getting lost)” we briefly touched on the subject of keywords. In this second part, “Keywords, The foundation of your SEO campaign” we will take a closer look at keywords and their functions as well as explaining how to go about choosing the most effective ones for your website in order to have the best chance of making it to that coveted number one SERPs position.

Choosing the best keywords to optimize for is arguably the most important part of planning the design of a website. Thought must go into who will be using the website because different groups use different search terms to find the same thing. The most direct approach would be to talk to your target demographic and ask what they would type into the search engine to find your product or service. You will find that people use vastly different search terms.  Let’s say you own a dog grooming business and you want to optimize your home page. The first thing you must do is find out what search terms pet owners, (your target demographic) use to find the service you provide. This can be accomplished in several ways. Use your imagination and come up with a way to ask your current customers how they would find you on the internet. Polls, quizzes and questionnaires in the waiting room or on the sales receipt, or just asking. This is the real world and these are the people you want to find you so trust what they say. Once you have come up with maybe 10 good search terms, it is time to do some research.  The easiest way to research these keywords is to use one of the keyword tools such as http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com which is, as the name implies, free and very effective. With this tool you can generate hundreds of potential keywords from the ten you already have and even get the KEI, (keyword effectiveness index) of each word. Briefly explained, the higher the KEI, the more popular the keywords are, and the less competition they have, which means they have a better chance of getting to the top of the SERPs. One thing to keep in mind when choosing keywords is that you will be using these words to describe your good or service within the content of your website pages. Words that will be hard to integrate into your written sales copy may not be as good a choice as more “natural sounding words” no matter their KEI. Search engines are surprisingly “smart” and are getting smarter all the time. If your written sales copy or page content does not “flow” or sounds “forced” and littered or “salted” with unnatural keywords you could get tagged as spam and this will negate all of your efforts. A good rule is to write for your human visitors using keywords with strategic purpose, always trying to sound natural. To hear Google tell it you would think page optimization is right on the verge of cheating, but as contradictory as it my sound they also offer advice on how to do it. A search on Google for keyword suggestion tools will deliver many very good and free tools to help you choose but the one way that I have found to be most effective is talking directly to the target demographic and using the words they use. This will bring users who are actively looking for your product and the chances of a conversion is far greater than if the visitor just stumbles on your site by accident.
Once you have the best keywords chosen it is time to begin optimizing your pages. A good practice is to start with your home page and when that has reached the top, move on to other pages of your website. When the search engine spiders crawl your website they begin from top to bottom and from left to right, just like humans. It is for this reason that your keywords must be at the top of your source code. It is a good Idea to use css for page formatting and to keep the navigation below your content. Because we are getting into the next subject of the series, “Keyword placement within your source code” I will pause here until the next installment. Look for it around mid Oct. Definitely before Halloween!……….. Boo!