Keyword research - the foundation of search engine optimisation

Choosing the right keywords for your website is critical as they determine how your site will be accessed by search engines and users. You need to understand before hand how your target audience search for the kinds of things you have on offer. Approach this with consideration as the keywords you target for will determine whether your site is a monster hit on the web or never visited. Here are a few of the things you need to bear in mind when dealing with keywords:

Search Engine Optimisation Keywords and Content

Everything that appears as text on your site including all the headlines and page titles (especially these) need to reflect the keyword phrases that you want to compete on in the search engines. Even the text describing your hyperlinks and the text around them, in particular the text associated with links on external sites that point to yours. It's no use having a link on www.10downingstreet.gov.uk pointing to your site if it just says "click here"; if your target keywords are "corrupt politician kits" then make sure this is the text in the link. Also give some consideration to the name of your site domain, the use of content directories with relevant keyword names (make these appear in the URL directly or using rewrite tools) and filenames. The latter elements are not critically important but it all helps. Lastly make sure your meta tag content reflects the keywords and the text of the page they describe.

Research Key Phrases and Keywords

Very few people just put a single word into a search engine. Experience has told them that they'll get millions of results and face a needle/haystack experience to get to a page with the information they are after. Get your proposed phrases (92 preferable 3 word phrases) together and go to a site like overture.com. Submit your phrase and it will show you similar phrases and their level of popularity. i.e. "web design cornwall" gave the following results:

This will give you some indication of how competitive your keyword phrase is. If there are 10,000 well built websites chasing traffic from the phrase "holiday travel bargains" then don't expect to get your site to page 1 on Google within a month of going live. The more specific you can be the better the chance you'll have of getting higher in the rankings.

Tools for keyword research

There are many free versions of tools out there but eventually you'll need to pay for it. Before you do that make sure you know how to use it properly. A tool like Wordtracker is best used imaginatively. Don't just stick to the phrases you think you want to compete on. Put in single keywords and look at the results as Wordtracker will return hundreds of phrases with that keyword in and some of them might be the one your are looking for to make the "difference that makes a difference".

Watch the competition and test your ideas on Google, Yahoo! and MSN

Test out your keyword phrases on all the major search engines and see how comes up top. If you are technically able then look at the source code and work out what they are doing both in the code and the content. Use this information to inform your own work.

Quality keyword means qualified searches

A good keyword/phrase is one that receives product or service specific searches but isn't so competitive that your site is "lost in the noise". So here is the checklist:

• Relevance: Is the keyword/phrase relevant to your product or service?
• Do you have content and headings that work with this keyword/phrase (don't randomly plonk keywords in that have no relevance to the real content)
• Keep up the good work: the behaviour of search engines changes all the time. So you need to keep abreast of developments and check your keyword strategy monthly. Your weblogs hold a wealth of information so use them
• Search Engine Optimisation is Darwinian; only the fittest survive; only those who evolve in tandem with the environment make it.