For the first time since I began this series about Search Engine Optimization, I started talking about keywords and their importance in the previous post (Keywords and SEO), with the post explaining what keywords and key phrases are, and what are some of the ways in which you should put yourself in your readers shoes to figure out keywords / key phrases to use.
In this post, I will get deeper into the use of keywords and key phrases, where all to use them, and how this impacts your Search Engine Ranking. There are multiple places you can put your keywords / key phrases, but putting them in your meta tags is not going to get your much benefit (by all means, put them, but make judicious use of them). More important is learning as to where all putting them can benefit you.
The most important of course (and as has mentioned previously) is to have a good keyword density in the content of your article. Going by the example of the camera in the previous post, let us consider the case where a person makes a website that tries to sell cameras and camera equipment (and this can be a challenging area since the number of sites selling the same stuff are pretty large). Ideal would be to high rankings for the keyword ‘camera’, but this is going to be very difficult since this is a very hotly contested keyword and the number of people trying to rank high (and making sustained efforts to achieve that) is pretty large. It is better to also look for multiple work keywords (or keyword phrases) that people would use to search for. So, you would want to select keyword phrases such as ‘Canon Camera’, ‘Sony Camera’, ‘Nikon Camera’, ‘Digital Camera’, ‘Cheap Camera’, and so on.
One way to identify more keywords that you can use, as well as identify the number of times those keywords are searched is through the use of tools. They also give you a reality check, since you may think that the keywords you are using and focusing on are the one that your potential readers will want to also search on, but it is best to verify this through some keyword suggestion tools. You can refer to your site, or just give a few keywords, and the 3 tools (and there are a large number of other tools available for the same) will identify the alternate keywords and the number of times those have been searched by (in one case, I was very surprised, since it seemed to me that I was writing about the wrong specialty, since most potential users were searching for a slightly different set of keywords). So, here goes:
2 tools by Google and 1 other tool:
Google Adwords Keyword tool (link)
Google Search-based keyword tool (link), allows you to refer to your site as well, and is based on actual Google search queries; very useful for those with an Adwords account, although useful to other people as well
FREE keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker (link)
Go ahead, give these tools a whirl, and you might find that some of the keywords that you thought are very relevant indeed are, while others are not so important.
Next post, we continue on the topic of keywords..
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