Step One - Choose Your Keywords
This first step is by far the most important and can take some time to get right.
When a person searches for something on the web, they enter a search term or search terms into a search engine. For example if you are looking for information about traveling to London you might try entering the search terms:
- London Hotels
- London Tourism
- United Kingdom Traveling
- What to do in London
- Hotel Bookings London
- Travel Agency London
- Traveling in London
- Airfares to London from Sydney
Notice how none of these terms are single words? That’s because most people don’t enter single words in the search engines because the relevance of the results is not high. Instead most search terms used are for two to three words.
There are five steps in choosing the most relevant keywords:
- Create a keyword spreadsheet
- Make a list of all your keywords and phrases
- Get some suggested keywords by entering your keywords and check how popular the keywords are
- Remove results that are not relevant to your website or are low in popularity
- Sort the list of your keywords by ranking effectiveness
1) Create a keyword spreadsheet
Open a spreadsheet and create the following rows and save it to your hard drive.
| No of Searches | Ranking / Effectiveness | |
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|
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2) Make a list of all your keywords and phrases
Then on a piece of paper write down every single keyword and key phrase that relate to your website and how you think people might search for your services or products.
This should be a large list and you the next step is to make this list even larger!
3) Get some suggested keywords and see how popular they are
Enter your keywords in the form at the following webpage and copy and paste the list of results for each to your spreadsheet entering the keywords in the spreadsheet along with the count of the number of searches performed.
http://www.instantposition.com/keyword_suggestion_tool.cfm*
So you will have a list of potentially hundreds of search terms in your spreadsheet. Do this until you have finished with all your keywords.
4) Remove results and Rank the keywords by effectiveness
The next step is to refine this last.
Delete the following terms:
- The lowest number of search results;
- Search terms that are not relevant to your website
- Search terms that are too broad and have too many results (this can be a double edged sword)
5) Sort the List of Keywords by ranking effectiveness
Then sort the list in descending order from the most popular search terms to the least popular.
It is important to remember that just because a search term is not popular this month that it may not be popular another time, and the results displayed do not include Google, so a low result may not be an actual low result!
*There are many ways to do this the most effective is to use one of the free online services that aggregates a lot of search engines:
http://www.instantposition.com is one such free tool. To use the tool you will need to create a free membership.
You now have your list of relevant keywords for your website and you can now start to create your site summary or description!
