Keyword Analysis & Choosing the Right Keywords

When optimizing your website for the search engines, good keyword analysis and choosing the right keywords can mean the difference between ranking well in the top search engines and not ranking at all. 

When creating your website, it's important to remember that the search engines rank pages not websites.  This means that each page of your site needs to have its own unique set of keywords or keyword phrases.  Those keywords need to precisely describe what each page is about. 

If your website has 20 pages, good keyword optimization for each page gives you 20 opportunities to rank well in the major search engines. 

One important thing to remember when creating your home page is don't confuse what you call your site with what you put in your site tags.  You can call your site anything you want but the search engines are looking for a site title and description that uses keywords that are meaningful and descriptive to what your site is about.    

A site called ‘My Inspired Treasures' is a nice site name but is a terrible keyword phrase. It not only doesn't tell you what the site is about, it's not a keyword phrase that anyone would search on to find a topic.  

So do you change your site's name?  You could, but it's not necessary.  Instead find the best keywords and use them in your title and description tags.  You can use 'My Inspired Treasures' in the site's header graphic, or even on your page title just so long as you include your best keyword phrase along with it in places that the search engines rely on for information such as your 'title' tag or the text heading of your page.

Finding your best keywords, specifically Long Tail Keywords

Your challenge is to find the best keywords or keyword phrases for each page of your site, these are often referred to as 'long tail keywords' these are the ones that are less competitive and searched for the least but can significantly increase your organic search positioning.  That's because you are targeting buyers using terms that are easier to rank for. 

Let's say for example you have a page about ‘boots’.  You might be tempted to use 'boots' as your main keyword because if you look on Wordtracker, 'boots' gets about 2822 searches a day, but there are over 74,000,000 competing sites using that keyword.  Instead, take a look at these phrases:

Count / Keyphrase

171 fashion boots  
43  fashion boots in the street     
452  womens boots
21  womens dress boots
4   discount womens dress boots
39   women's fashion boots 
  4  women's knee high fashion boots  
79   mens dress boots  
56   mens dress zipper boots
55   mens dress ankle boots 
20   mens pull on boots
  9  men's fashion boots     

These phrases have fewer search counts but also take a look at the number of competing sites for these phrases:

  Pages / Keyphrase

840,000  fashion boots 
180,000  fashion boots in the street  
184,000  womens boots 
171,000  womens dress boots 
207,000  discount womens dress boots
321,000  women's fashion boots 
  84,200  women's knee high fashion boots 
156,000  mens dress boots 
122,000  mens dress zipper boots 
109,000  mens dress ankle boots  
119,000  mens pull on boots 
299,000  men's fashion boots 
 
Each of those looks a lot better than 74,000,000. This means your chances are better for natural search engine ranking for these phrases.

But there's another part to using the long tail keyword phrase. Because the number of inbound links a web site has is still important to search engine ranking you want to get them for your own site but you also need to determine the number of inbound links your competition has.

To find the number of inbound links a web site has, go to yahoo.com and type in:  link:http://siteaddress

For example, if I go to Google and type in the keyword phrase 'best running shoes for women', I can see that the #1 result on Google for that keyword phrase has less than 25 inbound links. (To find the number of inbound links a web site has, go to yahoo.com and type in:  link:http://siteaddress )

If I can get at least that many inbound links to my site for that keyword phrase and do proper keyword optimization, I have an excellent chance of ranking on the first page of Google for that phrase.  

Using a more targeted keyword phrase will bring in less traffic but the traffic will be much more targeted, meaning you're more likely to provide what they are looking for and convert to a sale more easily. 

One additional benefit of using long tail keywords is they can be several keywords in one. Take for example the phrase:

"womens knee high fashion boots". This phrase includes all of these keywords as well:

boots
fashion boots
knee high fashion boots
knee high boots
womens boots
womens fashion boots  

How to Optimize your site's Keywords

Once you've found the keyword phrases for your site's page, you should include that keyword phrase in your page's file name, title tag, description tag, keywords tag and within your page text.

Here is where you should include your keyword phrase
 
- The page file name - Your page file name should include your page's keyword phrase.  For example:  http://www.yoursitename.com/keywordphrase.html

- Title tag of the page - Your title should contain your keyword phrase along with a benefit that your page may provide  

- Description Tag - Your description tag should inspire interest but also try to include your keyword phrase.

- The text heading of your page using an H1 tag

- The text sub-heading.  Any h2, h3 or h4 tags that you use should also contain the keyword phrase

- The body of the page.  Use the keyword phase in the body but don't compromise the flow of your text and don't overuse the key phrase.  
I've often just used it once in the body and that has been sufficient.

- Text Links - Use the keyword phrase as a text link on your site and place the text link on at least 3 other pages on your site.  This gives you some 'internal linking' that the search engines also count as 'good links'.   Here's an example of a text link:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/"> Keyword Phrase

How to get your keywords to work for you

Now that you have your targeted keyword phrases you should also use them in forum posts, articles and blog post titles by creating text 
links as shown above. This is where you will get some good 'external links'.

For most articles and forums you may want to use your home page keyword phrases, however if you have a particular sales page that you 
want to promote or your article or post is more precisely aimed at a specific page on your website then you can certainly use the keyword 
phrases for that page.

I highly recommend writing 1 or 2 articles or have someone write them for you and submit them to prominent article directories.  If your site 
is not ranking well, this is an ideal way to get your site to begin ranking well for your chosen keyword phrase.  

Keyword Tools

Wordtracker - The top internet marketing keyword research tool subscription service. 

Keyword Elite - Keyword Software that you buy.  This is a powerful keyword tool because Brad Callen holds nothing back with regard to training, tips and going the extra mile to helping you get the most keyword bang for your buck.   This product also works well if you use Google Adsense or Google Adwords.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool - This free tool is still available but no longer very reliable and very slow.  You're better off sticking with the free version of Wordtracker.

Good Keywords - This little tool is very handy free keyword research tool. It requires a download but it's completely safe.  

DigitalPoint Keyword Selection Tool - Another good free keyword research tool.

Searchspell - Great free tool for finding keywords that people often misspell