5 Secrets to Selecting Highly-Effective SEO Keywords (6th Artical of Seo)

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5 Secrets to Selecting Highly-Effective SEO Keywords

How many keywords should you assign to each page on your website--and how should you pick 

them? An Inc. 500 CEO offers his advice on SEO.
If there is a single concept that is the driver of much of the Internet’s growth over the past decade – not to mention nearly all of Google’s annual revenue of $25 billion – it is the concept of keywords. Keywords are what we type in when we are searching for products, services,
and answers on the search engines, an act that Americans performed 15.5 billion times in April 2010 according to ComScore, the web research firm.
Companies optimize their webpages for search by assigning keywords to those pages. The implications for a business of picking the right keywords are therefore huge. Keyword selection is fundamental to success when it comes to executing a paid search or PPC campaign. It is also integral to a website natural or organic ranking on the search engines.
But keywords are not just about SEO. They at the heart of a company's marketing campaign at its most granular level. Do our customers love our product because it is fast-acting or because it is long-lasting? Are we cheap or the best? Do we provide people with ideas or with help? If you can't immediately identify the most important keywords for your company, it is doubtful that you can effectively market your products and services to your target audience. The following guide will provide you with 5 ideas to keep in mind when you are selecting keywords on which to build your online marketing.
Picking SEO Keywords: Focus on Good Phrases
When it comes to search engine marketing, there may be no larger misnomer, no more archaic term than the ubiquitous keyword. In my view, there should be an official migration to the more accurate term keyphrase, but for now I will be forced to use what I consider to be an inaccurate term. My frustration with this term is that it quite simply implies a single word, which is rarely the strategy that we employ when doing keyword research and selection in the service of PPC and SEO campaigns.
All too often, people dramatically overthink the most basic keyword research concepts; keyword generation should start simply with answering the question of "What products or services do you sell?" If you sell dog food online,  the root words dog and food alone would be very poor keywords because on their own, neither dog nor food do a remotely good job at describing what you sell. Though this example makes it obvious, many times we have to fight through our urge to include those bigger, broader root keywords.
Dig Deeper: How to Be Keyword-Savvy
Picking SEO Keywords: Avoiding "Vanity" Keywords
Now let's look at a trickier example—one where the root keyword arguably does a good job describing what we are selling. Say I own an online jewelry store that sells all types of jewelry. To rank highly for the keyword jewelry would probably be at the top of my search engine marketing goals. And yet this would probably not be a profitable keyword that will drive relevant traffic to my site. That is because, from an organic SEO perspective, you are unlikely to rank highly for this term unless you are a huge, highly authoritative site—or lucky enough to be Jewelry.com, knowing that Google rewards keywords that match website addresses.
In this case, you would do well to go after more specific keywords such as gold jewelry, silver necklace, or women's Rolex watch.  Not only is the competition for these terms less fierce but, from both an SEO and a PPC perspective, those more specific keywords are going to have a significantly higher conversion rate to purchases on your site.
Sometimes we refer to those root keywords as "vanity keywords," because if you do just one search to see who seems to be winning the space, you are likely to pick the single broadest keyword and see who comes up ranked highly. In nearly every case, however, we have found it to be more successful and deliver a significantly better return on your SEM investment by focusing on the hundreds or even thousands of more specific keywords that more closely match the services, products, brands, and locations that you sell or serve.
Dig Deeper: What You Need to Know About Your Website
Picking SEO Keywords: Using Google's Wonder Wheel
This is in my opinion the best little secret of everyone's favorite search engine: the Google Wonder Wheel. Released about a year ago but virtually unknown compared with Google's much more visible search tools, the Wonder Wheel can be accessed by doing a search and then selecting "Wonder Wheel" under the filter options on the lefthand navigation.
What you are presented with now is a visual representation of the way that Google groups together keywords. (Indirectly, you can also deduce how users themselves perceive search terms.) This alone can become the basis of your PPC and SEO keyword research.
Starting with the search term dog food, I see related more specific terms like dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food brands, which can help identify other keywords to focus on. Then, clicking on dog food brands, the search engine automatically expands that keyword to be another hub, with more specific keywords related to dog food brands such as nutro dog food, Purina dog food, and so on.
At my comapny, Wpromote, we use this tool to help shape overall content strategies. Continuing with the dog food example, we can see that ratings, comparison, and reviews all were all grouped as closely related to dog food in general, implying that people that are searching for dog food are very interested in the comparison and review side of things. So from a content strategy perspective, it would be a very powerful takeaway to include a heavy emphasis on customer ratings, third-party reviews, and side by side comparisons to help the consumers make their dog food selections while shopping on our site.
Dig Deeper: How to Take Advantage of Online Reviews
Picking SEO Keywords: The Value of Repetition
One concern we hear frequently is whether it is beneficial or harmful to repeat keywords. In other words, should we vary keywords (dog food, puppy food, and Purina) or repeat keywords (dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food rankings.) The short answer is that the repetition is just fine, as long as the meaning of the phrase as a whole is sufficiently varied. In other words, dog food and dog food online are basically synonymous, and the content that one might expect to find associated with both keywords is the same. However, dog food reviews and dog food comparison indicate somewhat different content and therefore are appropriate to be used in tandem as keywords.
The more important concept to keep in mind is that you want to choose keywords that best relate to the content present on a web page and on a website; if you don't have a dog food comparison matrix, then don't bother including comparison-related keywords; you are misleading your users, and certainly not fooling Google. So in an ideal world, you do have a comparison section, a reviews section, and a rankings section, housed on different pages or sections of your site, with each one tagged with the appropriate keywords. Correspondingly, your SEO and PPC search engine marketing efforts should that content by driving review keywords to the review pages and so on.
Dig Deeper: The 9 Places to Put Your Keywords for SEO Power
Picking SEO Keywords: Guiding Your Content Strategy
Keywords should guide your overall content strategy. We have referred to this concept several times in the preceding tips, but it is important enough to leave as a final guiding paradigm.
Conventionally, we think linearly about content and keywords; we build a website, and then launch search engine marketing campaigns to drive users to our content.  That approach has its limits. When we think about strategy at Wpromote, we think about  a circular process; since our keyword research reflects both what users are seeking and the way that the search engines (particularly Google) "think" about keywords, we let that help to drive our content strategy.
Put differently, to be phenomenally successful, we seek not to take static content and try to pry greater results from it; instead, we leverage the existing needs of the users, and use that knowledge to help us create the best possible user experience. That, in turn, will be rewarded with higher rankings, greater traffic, and a higher ROI from our marketing efforts.

SEO Strategies: How to Choose Keywords for Your Website ( 5th artical of Seo)

SEO Strategies: How to Choose Keywords for Your Website

Whenever I’m working on a website copywriting project, I ask my client to fill out a questionnaire that helps me understand their business. This enables me to write copy that truly represents the client’s company, mission, and goals.
One of the items on the questionnaire used to be “Please list any keywords related to your website or business.”
I quickly found out that very few small business owners understood what I meant by “keywords.”  Sometimes, they would jot down something like “use your best judgment.” Usually, they’d list a few keywords, but it was clear that they weren’t researched keywords for SEO. They were simply words and phrases that represented the products and services that the client offered, and they had been selected at random.
Since most small business owners don’t specialize in web content and design, how could they be expected to know that when an online marketing consultant inquires about keywords, she means keywords that have been researched for SEO purposes?
It wasn’t long before I changed my questionnaire to read “Have you conducted any SEO keyword research?” Rewording the question had some interesting results. Some clients simply put “no.” Others became curious: What do you mean by keyword research?

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is an online marketing strategy that grows traffic to a website by increasing its visibility on search engines. This is primarily done through search engine optimization (SEO).
Search engine marketing is extremely competitive. Most small business owners think that by simply launching a website, they’ll automatically start getting traffic through search engines. But these days, to get traffic through search engines, you have to carefully optimize your website. That means researching and choosing keywords, implementing those keywords, establishing incoming links, and monitoring keyword and traffic performance.
Search engine marketing isn’t for everyone. If you’re on a tight budget in a field with highly congested keywords, you would be better off with an alternative online marketing strategy. There are lots of ways to draw traffic, and before you start an SEO campaign, you should do some research, consult with an SEO specialist, and make sure it’s a good match for your business.

Keyword Research

You can’t just pluck keywords out of nowhere. Well you can, but your results will be less than ideal. Keyword research can be a tedious process. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of possible keywords for just about any search term you can think of. When you conduct keyword research in preparation for optimizing your site, your goal is to find the keywords that will draw the most traffic. You also want the traffic to be targeted to your business offerings.
Let’s say you run a small, independent bookstore. You might think that a good keyword to pursue would be “books.” But that would be wrong. To gain traffic through a keyword like that would cost tens of thousands of dollars in research, content development, and other SEO efforts. You’d be much better off finding narrower and more localized search terms. Another option would be to forgo search engine marketing altogether and use another strategy to increase traffic to your site.
To discern which search terms would most benefit your website efficiently and effectively, you conduct (or hire someone to conduct) keyword research. This is a process in which you start with some general and obvious search terms and use various online SEO tools to expand the list of terms, so that there are plenty of choices. Then, you review each of the terms to determine how competitive each one will be, how much content you’d have to add to your site to compete effectively, and decide which keywords your target customers are most likely to enter into a search engine. For example, people searching for the term “books” are not necessarily looking for an independent bookstore (here’s a hint — “bookstore” is a more targeted keyword than “books”) and even if they are looking for such a store, they may be in a different geographic location.
Here are some questions to keep in mind when conducting keyword research:

• What are the primary products or services that the website offers?
• What alternative or synonymous keywords can be used?
• How much search volume do these keywords generate each month?
• Which keywords are potential customers likely to use in searching for these products or services?
• What does the competition for these keywords look like?

It’s important to note that when we talk about keyword competition, it’s not necessarily the same businesses with which we’re competing. In other words, there will be other sites that are using the same keywords as you, but their product or service offerings may not be directly competing with yours. You’re competing with them to get search engine traffic via keywords rather than competing with them in business.

SEO

For many small businesses, a little SEO can really boost traffic. The decision of whether or not to pursue SEO is one that must be made by each individual business, and the decision will likely rest on how competitive keywords are within your industry, the amount of resources you can dedicate to optimization, and the findings that come from keyword research.
One thing, however, is constant: A successful SEO campaign starts with keyword research, and keywords should never be chosen on a whim. A little research can go a long way in helping you make smart decisions about whether search engine marketing and SEO is the right online marketing strategy for your business.

INFOGRAPHIC: Choosing the Best Keywords for SEO (artical no 4)

INFOGRAPHIC: Choosing the Best Keywords for SEO

Ask anyone in the SEO industry how important keywords are,

and you’ll get the same answer from everyone. Choosing the best keywords for your website is crucial in search engine optimization.

Keyword targeting is essential because SEO efforts can take time and energy, and you want to be sure that you’re rewarded with great search engine traffic.

Therefore, it is important to find words that aren’t too competitive but provide good search traffic. The below infographic illustrates DIYSEO’s key tactics for keyword selection. The infographic displays the keyword selection process and uses the example of a New Orleans lawyer. When looking at the infographic, be sure to take a look at your keywords to make sure they follow these best practices.

We’d love to hear about your business’s experience with keywords!

Do you agree with our list of top tactics for the keyword targeting process? 

What other recommendations do you have for people just beginning to choose keywords for their small business websites?

Choosing Keywords for SEO ( 3rd tip to increse u r trafic)

Choosing Keywords for SEO

5 Biggest Mistakes When Choosing Keywords for SEO

 

One of the most important things when optimizing your website for search engines is the keywords that you choose. Keywords are like the foundation of a house, if you don’t get it right the entire house crumbles. Targeting the right keywords will set yourself up for success; targeting the wrong keywords will drive useless traffic to your website making your site fail to convert for your target audience.
Once you have identified your keywords you will need to incorporated them throughout your entire website design so that you can ensure that Google and other search engines can determine how relevance your website is to the targeted keywords you selected.
Some of the mistakes you should avoid when choosing your keyword phrases are:

• Targeting individual keywords: Remember only choose converting keywords (KW). For example “computer” computer isn’t a converting keyword, a better choice would be “Laptop computer” or an even better KW would be an exact model of the laptop you are selling.
• Targeting too many keywords: Two keyword phrases is a good rule to stick with. Remember when Google spiders your website the more words you give it the harder time it will have determining the relevance.
• Targeting Stop Words: Some examples of stop words- about, above, inside, everything, useful etc.
• Targeting keywords that are too broad: Remember whatever KW’s you decide on need to be converting KW’s. They need to be words that are going to solve your potential clients problems. Remember you are going to be investing time in creating a site designed around these keywords; you don’t want to make the mistake of choosing broad keywords that doesn’t convert.
• Not using different variations of the keywords: You may have found high traffic KW’s using a keyword research tools, but the estimates provided by the tools often group similar KW’s, alternate spellings into a single word. Great traffic is usually hidden when using keyword research tools tools.

Make sure you avoid the 5 common mistakes listed above when choosing your keywords since the keyword selection is the foundation for your website’s success when ranking in Google.

Choosing the Right SEO Keywords: A Non-Robot Perspective(top 10 artical, 2nd Artical)

Choosing the Right SEO Keywords: A Non-Robot Perspective

This is part of The Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization series, written for humans, not robots.
Today, we’re talking about choosing the right SEO keywords.
Before you start writing, you need to decide which keywords you want to focus on. These are the terms people would search to find your page.
SEO is about having a laser focus, so choosing your terms before writing is essential.

How to Choose SEO Keywords

Here are a few tips for choosing the right keywords:

Don’t Be Too Broad or Specific

It’s important that the term you choose is broad enough that a lot of people will search for it, but narrow enough that you have a decent chance of getting a high search rank for it.
For example, the term “Internet” is way too general. However, “Ways to Succeed in Launching a Business on the Internet” is a pretty good one. Likewise, so is the term “Africa” (sites like Wikipedia will often dominate these spots). Though, “Best safari tours in Kenya” is a much better term to focus on.

Focus on What You’re Already Writing About

SEO favors the “drip method” of content creation, which means that it takes time and frequency to make it to the top of a search query (according to Seth Godin, this is “the secret of the web“).
If you’re trying to get a high ranking on a keyword and you only intend to write about it once, you’re most likely going to fail. So pick something you write about often.
Look at your categories, article titles, and other content on your site. Are there common keywords that you’re already writing on? Consider expanding on them in some way.
“But I write about everything…” No, you don’t.
Do you write about early 20th century jazz music? Do you write about the mating habits of frogs? You don’t write about everything. Your writing has a focus. There are topics that you just naturally gravitate towards. Focus on what you’re already writing about.

Do Keyword Research

Research? What?! That sounds like robot talk to me. Please understand that I’m using this term very loosely. If you just winced at the term “research” just try this: Use Google suggest, also called auto-complete.
When you start typing a word into Google and it fills in the rest of the search for you, this is Google Suggest at work.
Before you finish, you’ll see phrases that pop up as most relevant (and the occasional, ridiculous results). Start here before getting into more advanced forms of keyword research.
Once you get more comfortable, check out other Google tools, like the Adwords Keyword Estimator or Google Insight for Search.
And when you’re ready for something even more in-depth, read this guide to keyword research. Until then, using the auto-complete on a search engine will get you pretty far.

Write It, Already

I am prone to buyer’s remorse. This affects every decision that I make, including how I blog. Once I choose a keyword to focus on, I think of 100 other terms I could have chosen. I start second-guessing myself.
Why? Mostly, because I’m scared; I’m avoiding the hardest part of writing — doing it.
Don’t spend a ton of time on this stuff. Do a little research, think through the terms that you’ll focus on, and then get to it. Don’t let this turn into Resistance for you.
No more procrastination. It’s time to write the post.
For more on keywords and writing SEO content for humans, read: 5 SEO tips for bloggers that won’t make people gouge their eyes out.
Also on this subject, I found this article on Problogger to be helpful: How to Select Good SEO Keywords
Once you’ve chosen the right keywords, then it’s time to start writing.
What questions do you have about choosing the right keywords? Do you have any best practices to share?

how to chose seo, top ten article, 1st artical

How to Choose SEO Keywords

When consumers use keywords to search for your type of business, do the results point to your company or your competition?
Because the right SEO keywords essentially grab potential customers by the wrist and lead them right to your business, it’s up to you to make sure you facilitate the meeting between the user and your website.

Relevant keywords bump you to the top of search engine rankings; without targeted SEO keywords, you could be losing business 24/7.
While keeping tabs on your competition is necessary, you don’t want to completely mimic your SEO efforts against the opposition’s strategy. Taking the time to select specific keywords for your business and website is key to edging out the competition. The following steps help you choose and implement the best keywords for your website:

• Determine Your Site’s Platform

The best time to determine key elements of your SEO strategy is during the website design phase. Ask yourself key questions that force you to hone in on your intended audience and your content:

o   What is your website’s focus?
o   Who is your audience?
o   What makes your website valuable?
Select keywords based on these answers, and conduct your own market research by asking current customers what words they would use to search for your website. Remember to use keywords that include products, services and general information.

• Research Keyword Popularity

Once you’re armed with keywords and phrases that accurately describe your business, products and services, you’ll need to determine how many other websites use the same keywords, and how many people actually use those keywords in their search efforts. To determine the answers of these questions, go to the Google Keyword tool or a paid tool such as RavenTools to find out the amount of results each of your keywords or phrases return. Additionally, you’ll find out what keywords people actually use to search for your type of business and all variations of those keywords.

• Keep Keywords on Your Page

You’re ready to dive in to the hard part – integrating your chosen SEO keywords and phrases into your content. First and foremost, make sure targeted keywords for a page are actually on that page. Use keywords within the title, in the content, in bold, in italics, etc. The key is to utilize your keywords in as many different ways as possible, without repeating words or using words that don’t pertain to your company or website. Search engines are smart; you’ll be banned if you try any sort of spam technique or deceitful tactic to gain visitors.
Other important elements for SEO integration include using META tags in the head section of your document, including common misspellings of relevant keywords, and using both singular and plural forms of keywords.

With a comprehensive SEO strategy, you’ll raise awareness of your business, increase your credibility and drive sales. It’s up to you to stay abreast of industry trends or changes. For best results, keep your keywords fresh to mirror evolving consumer search habits.

This guest post was provided by University Alliance and submitted on behalf of University of San Francisco.  USF offers complete SEO training courses available 100% online and taught by leading industry experts.  If you complete three of the required courses then you’ll earn an Internet marketing certificate.