Website design and keyword selection seem to regularly get overlooked when talking about SEO. Everyone wants to build their content, drive traffic, build links and make money. So do we, but without a solid foundation, your success is going to be lessened. A solid foundation will allow you to manage your campaign properly. Even if you already have a site built, taking another look at a few of these basic principals will allow you to go back and fine tune things to work better.
The first thing you need to do is come up with as many ideas as possible. Type in a word doc a list of keywords and keyword phrases. Go ahead and come up with as large of a list as you would like, but for this demonstration, I am going to use a sample list for one of my sites that deals with creating a blog.
Now we will use a great tool to look at how to choose good keywords. This is a free tool that is excellent and part of Google Adwords. It is the keyword tool, if you have not used it, you are missing out. Search for “Google keyword tool” if you have not signed up for Adwords. If you do use Adwords, you can click on “tools” under campaign management, then choose “keyword tool”. It is a great tool, and it is free.
Take your keyword list and paste it in the box marked “get keyword ideas”. For this excercise, I used internet marketing services. It may not be directly related, but it will be a good example to look at for our purposes. The tool will take a couple seconds while it is thinking, then spit out a list for you, potentially large. This list may look something like this (but much larger depending on how many keywords you use):
- internet marketing business
- global internet marketing
- internet marketing strategy
- internet marketing services
- internet marketing online
- internet marketing products
- internet marketing analysis
The perfect thing about this tool is that it gives you the ability to see the volume a term is searched for on Google. Also, it shows you by a bar graph, how much competition there is for that chosen term. In this manner, you can get a good idea of your search volume and how hard it should be to rank well for your particular term. If you would like more info, please feel free to download our free seo book. This seo guide will walk you through the entire optimization process step by step. Not only that, it is entirely free!
