Keyword Analysis & Choosing the Right Keywords

Choosing the most relevant keywords for each page of your website can mean the difference between ranking well in the top search engines or not ranking at all.

The search engines rank web pages not websites, so each page of your site needs to have its own unique set of keywords or keyword phrases and those keywords need to precisely describe what each page is about. 

Note that your home page may have a more generic keyword phrase while each subsequent page will have more descriptive words. 

Additionally unless the domain name of your website includes your best keywords don't use it in your title and description tags.
 
For example, you might have a jewelry site called

 ‘InspiredTreasures.com'

The words 'inspired treasures' is great site name but not a keyword phrase people would use to find jewelry, so that's not a good keyword phrase. 

Instead find a keyword phrase that people would use to find whatever it is your page is about, then use that keyword phrase in your title and description tags.

Finding the Best Keywords

Your best keywords are the words that most accurately describe what you are writing about and using a good keyword tool is how you find them. 

Part of doing productive keyword research is finding a keyword research tool will give you the words and phrases that people are actually using to find things online.  

For instance, you may have a  web page about 'blue leather handbags', but using a keyword research tool may tell you that people use the words 'blue leather purses' when they do their searches.   These is the keyword phrase you'll want to use.

The  more descriptive keyword phrases are often referred to as 'long tail keywords'.

For example, the keyword 'shoes' is not very descriptive and as keywords go, is very competitive. However the long tail keyword phrase 'womens red athletic shoes' is highly descriptive. It also has fewer competing web pages using that phrase.

There's no hard and fast rule on finding the best keywords however a good rule of thumb is to find the phrase that most accurately describes the page and that gets high numbers of searches a day with the least number of competing web pages.

The calculation for finding the most used, least competitive keywords is called the 'Keyword Effectiveness Index' or KEI, however due to the huge number of websites and pages that come online every day the KEI calculation has become more complex so using a keyword tool like Wordtracker for example, calculates the KEI for you.

Just remember, the higher the KEI the better, meaning you're likely to have a better chance of ranking well in the search engines.
 
How to Optimize Your Pages for your Chosen 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:

            http://www.yoursite.com/"> Keyword Phrase

See Also: Getting High Quality Links to Your Website