According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 80 percent of the American population regularly uses the internet to find information. Collectively, Americans do more than 20 billion searches per month. It is critical that your website is easy for them to locate.
Americans are using search engines to access and explore the Web; they rarely know where they are headed when they open their preferred search engines. If the search engines cant locate your website or dont rank it well, it will end up ignored. 75 percent of Internet users never scroll beyond the first page of search results.
If you want people to find your website, you need to calibrate its content in such a way that it will be optimized for search engines. By salting your website with keywords that your intended/ideal visitor base will use to find you, youll attract the attention of search engines.
The process by which you use keywords to direct users to your site is called search engine optimization. The first step in any successful search engine optimization project is to do keyword research. This is actually a straightforward process, and it can bring great rewards if done well.
To begin, you need to select a keyword for seo that you think visitors will use to visit your site, as well as keywords you would like your website to rank for. You should already have some idea what keywords visitors to your site will use to locate you. Keywords are, after all, intimately related to content strategy, marketing and product development. Selecting a keyword for seo is no different than making a business preposition or describing what need your product and/or service satisfies.
Once you have assembled a preliminary list of words, terms and queries, you can begin researching their popularity.
You can do this using tools like the Google Keyword Adwords Tool, Search Term Suggestion Tool, SEMRush, or Wordtracker. These services will tell you how many times people searched for your keywords and how often they searched for related search terms. The more times a keyword has been searched for the more in-demand that keyword is.
These services can tell you a lot more about your prospective keywords than the number of times they are being searched for, however. They can also tell you how many pages of web content are already targeting your intended words; they can tell you how much competition you face already and will face in the future for the online turf each of your keywords represents.
Once youve researched your initial keyword list, you should know how popular each of your keywords is and how much competition you will encounter from others trying to rank for it. From there, you will be able to narrow down your list to a few good keywords. A good keyword for seo is one that is being searched for by a lot of people but few websites are currently trying to rank for. This kind of keyword essentially represents a kind of unmet demand.
During the keyword research process, youre likely to have stumbled upon related keywords to consider. Using the same keyword tools identified above you can research these terms and see if they merit inclusion in your future SEO strategy.
Once youve finished your research and found a set of good keywords to focus on, you can begin judiciously incorporating them into your web content. Create content that search engines can easily find but which isnt so larded with keywords that it will annoy visitors to your site: write for both users and search engines.
