Keyword research is most important part of any SEO campaign. Select wrong keywords to target and your entire SEO campaign will result in nothing but loss of time and efforts. Choosing the wrong keywords will force you to re-work your pages for new keywords and wait for the search engines to re-crawl your site. For this reason, a few hours trying to pick the right keywords is time well spent?
To start, take a look at your pages. Look at them carefully and write down the words and phrases that best define your site. Try to build a list of two or three word phrases using free keyword research tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Once you have developed this list of potential keyphrases you are ready for the next step: to analyze the demand and supply for those keyphrases, and choose the best ones (those with good demand and not enough supply).
Here are some steps which can guide you through selection of best keywords to target.
Steps to select best keywords to target:
- Select the right keywords for each of your individual pages.
- The best keywords will be those that are popular search terms (terms that people actually search for), and that clearly describe the purpose and the content of your pages. They will also have to be keywords for which there is relatively low competition.
- The more specific your keyphrase, the easier it will be for your site to rank well. You should therefore target keyphrases with three or more words to significantly improve your chances.
- There is no sense in trying to optimize your pages for super-competitive keywords where you don't stand a chance of ranking well (most one-word keyphrases fall into this category: for example, it would be impossible to rank well for the keyword 'phone'). It would be better to target phrases like:
- 'mobile phone' - easier but still competitive
- 'smart mobile phones' - easier and less competitive
- 'business purpose phones' - easier and not as competitive.
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