Posts Tagged ‘choosing keywords’
The keywords you target can have a huge impact on the search rankings you obtain and the traffic you get. First and foremost your keywords need to relevant to the content of your pages. If you have a page about green widgets you don’t want to try to optimize that page for the term red widgets.
Popularity vs. Competition
There are really two parts to keyword research once you have in your mind the kind of keywords that are relevant to your page. You need to be concerned with how many people search for the keywords and how much competition there is for the keywords.
No Searches = No Traffic
It is useless to optimize for keywords that no one searches for. You need a way to get an idea of how many searches per month are done for your selected keyword phrase. Fortunately, there is a great free tool from Google AdWords that you can use. You can even enter the URL of the page you want to target and the tool will suggest keywords.
Competition
The other side of the keyword selection coin will determine how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keyword phrase. You need to see how many Web sites are competing for the same keywords. The easiest way to gauge competition is to do a search on Google for your phrase and place quotes around it to specify the exact phrase. If there are hundreds of thousands of pages found you may want to choose a less competitive keyword phrase.
Remember to read the rest of the SEO tips to get more ideas for optimizing your site.
