Keyword Optimisation

The first step in the SEO process revolved around the researching keywords to target, finding out what people are searching for on the main search engines and then making sure your site is optimised to provide pages that will feature these. 

As Google takes 80% of the search traffic and the top three links in google search results get 75% of the click through, our goal is to be in this top 3 on google. To do this, we are going to look for search terms in which we can build our presence in these results. 

1) Generate some relevant search terms

Think of a search phrase or search term that defines your product offering or the goal of your site.  Now type this onto the google keyword tool to get suggested keywords and the associated stats. These results provide you with a list of relevant (in Google's eyes) and the number of searches carried out using these search terms. Save these results to your favourite spread sheet programme by clicking on the link (.csv) at the bottom right of the results table. 

2) Cull the list

First of all we are only interested in the keywords and the search volume, so delete the other columns. The we want to get rid of any keywords that are obviously not related to our site, the google software may think they are relevant but as a human we know they are not. Go ahead and delete the irrelevant words. 

3) Research the competition

Now we have our list of relevant keywords we need to decide which ones are worth targeting. We are going to try the low hanging fruit but this stage is rather long and tedious, so make yourself a cup of tea first. 

For each of the keywords, type it into google and record the number of matching pages in a new column in your spreadsheet. For example "Open Your Diary" has 2 million matching pages. 

Now divide the number of searches (average search volume) by the number of matching pages and express this as a percentage. Order by this new column.  

We now have an idea of both what people are searching for (the search volume) and the amount of competition (the number of results), so the ratio we've created helps us identify which terms we stand a better chance of appearing high in the search results. We'll pick 7-10 of these. 

4) The real competition

If you have a little more time, you can identify the real competition by using the search terms along with a couple of google commands (some extra text you add to the search to filter the results).  As google uses the presence of the keyword in the URL and in the page title to help build its results list, we can check the performance of the keywords within these with allintitle: and allinURL:. Try allintitle: Open Your Diary

With these you can build a similar ratios to see which of the keywords is worth competing on (which terms are searched for, but for which there are few competitors). 

5) Using your keywords

See the next post