Lesson 3 – Keyword research for best positioning

Keywords, keywords, keywords. If you’re beginning the process of making your web site search engine optimized, then you’ve probably heard a lot about keywords and how important they are to the SEO process. You might even think that keywords are overrated and not as essential to SEO as many make them out to be. That’s not the case, though. Keywords ARE every bit as important as they’ve been made out to be, and if you do not know the correct usage of keywords, you will not be able to have a correctly SEO’d site, period. You’ll learn all about keywords in this lesson, as well as researching keywords so that you get the best rankings possible.

What are Keywords?

Keywords are words which are very important in the eyes of search engine spiders. These are words which make search engine spiders pay attention to the content of a site. You can think of it this way: you’re reading an article about NBA basketball players. Every time you see the key phrase (which is a set of keywords strung together) “NBA basketball players”, it reminds you of what the article is about and makes you take notice. That’s the same effect seen on search engine spiders with keywords. When they spot a keyword or key phrase, it reminds them of what the purpose of the site is and catches their eyes. The more you catch the attention of a spider, the more the spider reports your site back to the search engine. The more “reports” the search engine gets, the higher your page is ranked. That’s pretty much how it all works.

Why Do I Need Keywords?

You should already know why you need keywords for your site: they allow your site to get ranked higher. Keywords are the very fundamental part of search engine optimization. Without them, there really is no search engine optimization going on in a site. If you wish to create a site that is search engine optimized, you must incorporate keywords.

How Do I Select Keywords?

Selecting keywords is not as complex as you might think. It’s actually very easy, provided you know the process for doing it. We’ll go over that right now.

The first step of the process is to determine what exactly your site is about. What is the purpose of your site? Who do you want to attract to the site? The answers to these questions will tell you what to do next.

When you’ve decided what your site is about, you can now determine what keywords to use. If you are running a site on digital cameras, you’ll want to choose keywords that are relevant to this niche. For instance, you might use key phrases such as “canon digital cameras”, “kodak digital camera”, “nikon digital cameras” etc. The point is to try to take your niche and create keywords based off of this. That way you’ll have legitimate keywords that are relevant and not “cheap”. You might want to check out Google and see what keywords are used the most and which aren’t used as much.

Next, you should create a list of 5-10 keywords based off your research. You should then pick a keyword for each page of content. This keyword or key phrase will be used throughout the content of a page. If you use different key phrases or keywords for different pages, this will make your site diversified and will prevent keyword stuffing, which is a bad SEO practice. It will also help your SEO rankings because you are using various keywords.

Writing the Content

When it comes time to write the content of your site and use the keywords you’ve selected, you have two options. The first is to hire someone to do it. The second is to write the content yourself. The former is a very easy way of getting the content for your site as you can go to any freelance site and hire a SEO writer. The latter is a more time invasive, yet often more effective way of getting the content. By writing the content yourself, you ensure that it lives up to your standards and uses the keywords enough.

If you choose to write the content yourself, you’ll want to make sure that you have a good keyword density for each page. As you learned in Lesson 1, keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the total number of words. So if you use the keyword 5 times in a 500 word piece of content, you have a keyword density of 1%, which is a pretty low density. You’ll want a keyword density of 3%-5%. To achieve this density, all you need to do is sprinkle in the keywords into the content in a natural manner. That’s it.

Lesson 3 Wrap Up:

In lesson 3, you’ve learned practically everything there is to know about keywords and can now apply this fundamental SEO principle to your site.