Keyword Research Facts, Tips and Tricks for Beginners
Keywords are words or phrases that search engines use to understand what your website is all about. They use complex algorithms and metrics in order to determine relevance and importance when trying to bring up results on a search page. They crawl through billions of interconnected documents, searching for relevant material according to the keywords introduced by the user. Understanding how to make your site “relevant” to a search engine is what keyword research is all about. It is probably the most useful tool in internet marketing that can make or break a business.
It’s Easy to Make a Wrong Turn When It Comes to Your Keywords
When creating your website, you should think about which keywords are relevant to your business, and add them throughout your site, in articles and pages. However, they should come in a natural variation, and have an accurate connection to the things presented on the site. Inserting too many keywords and overcrowding your site is known as keyword stuffing, an unethical technique which might get your site penalized or even banned by search engines such as Google.
Loading your site with keywords might have the opposite effect on your site, so choose wisely in respect with search engine optimization. Remember, you should design your website especially for users and not for search engines. You indeed need the help of search engines if you want to rank high in the search result page, but adding too many keywords will make your articles look forced and unnatural and will not appeal to many users, thus turning away visitors who end up on your site.
Most popular keywords might have millions of searches per month, but that will also mean that competition is fierce for them. Choosing a more specific term or phrase might be more beneficial in the long term. On the other end, keywords which are too unique might be hard to find by users, so finding a balance between the two opposites is best.
When selecting a keyword, you should consider the advantages and disadvantages of its length. Short keywords are popular and come in high demand, while longer terms and phrases will be less popular. Longer, more complex keywords might be less searched for, but will drive super targeted traffic to your site. Long tail keywords also comprise 70% of all searches, so in the long term, opting for them might mean you can convert most traffic into money, since people coming to your site are already searching for specific items, and not just surfing on the web and testing the market. People without SEO training are most likely to succeed at first by using long tail keywords, as their lack of experience might make them struggle with the competition for popular searches.
Demand and competition for keywords is dynamic, and always shifting. With proper research, you should be able to discern which keywords are relevant to that moment in time, and optimize your site accordingly. Also, using synonyms and finding the right combinations in order to whittle down the competition is another useful technique employed in SEO.
How to Use the Keywords You Have Chosen
If you have decided on which keywords are most relevant to your business, you should now consider how to use them and add them to your site. If you’re just creating a new website, adding the keywords to your domain name might be very effective. Someone searching for a keyword present in your domain name might make the search engines think that the user is specifically searching for your site. If changing your domain name is not possible, you can still add keywords in the URL, through an internal page. When using this technique, you want to make sure you aren’t trying to fool both users and search engines, and that visitors arriving on your site will find exactly what they were looking for.
Since search engines such as Google have updated their algorithms, they are also checking the links in anchor texts, making sure they are relevant to one another and to the general content of the article. Getting words in the title of the webpage is also very important, as it is different than the website name and URL. The titles are the names for the pages on your site, and since they are the ones showing up in a search engine’s page results, they are critical in affecting your visibility on the internet. Use the keywords in html tags, especially in the title, and in the metadata and body of your articles. Since search engines aren’t capable of analyzing non-text elements such as images, it is very important to add keywords in the Alt and Title attributes of image tags, thus enabling them to understand what the image is all about.
Bottom Line
Knowing how to conduct keyword research is critical for anyone wanting to have their websites seen on the web. It will save money, time and frustration by knowing which keywords are profitable and how to best implement them into a site in order to obtain a high page ranking.
