One of the first steps in search engines optimization is keywords research.
Say you have the website ready, it is probably already listed in search engines (type in Google search box “site:www.website_name.com“), but it doesn’t rank very well at the moment, so you start looking on the web for a solution then, you come across the SEO term which stands for search engines optimization or optimisation.

There are many tools available at the present for example: http://inventory.overture.com/  now owned by Yahoo or Google Keyword Tool, but myself, I  don’t find them very useful for a website that targets the Irish market.

A better approach for the moment, until new tools are made available is to sit down and write on a piece of paper a few sentences that would describe your business.
At the end of the day, nobody knows your business better than you do.

Now sit back and read them over and over again, until it sinks in, then try to get the meaning of one sentence at a time in just 3-4 words and write them down.

Why 3-4 words? Because if you are in a tight competitions, 1 (never recommended) or 2 words ranking are a lot harder to achieve, and more than 50% chances are that you will never get the results you are looking for.

E.g. – trying to optimise your website for just “insurance“, would be a mistake and you will have a very slim chance of making it into the first 10 results out of 414,000,000 found (default number of results Google returns per page), but if you are going for “car insurance” with only 79,500,000 results or even better, “car insurance ireland” with just 2,810,000 , you have a better chance.

Unless 2 words are more than 75% relevant to your query, search engines will try very hard to give you the right results.
Have a look at the example above, searching for “insurance ireland” could mean anything related to insuring something but what, a car, a house, valuables, etc….??? 

Now if you are looking to insure a car, and as usual you go to a search engine like Google.ie, what are you going to type in the search box?
More than likely, you will type car insurance and if results returned are not to your satisfaction you will add Ireland.
Don’t you?

Basically the point is that: the longer the phrase the greater the chances are for your website to rank well.

Getting back to our “ships”, make a list of as many short phrases you could come up with, then go back over them and try to make the list shorter like 10 to 15.

Now that you have the list, open your browser, go to a search engine and start your search for the phrases you have on the paper one by one. Look at the results returned and navigate to the first 3-5 websites that are on the first page, but not the ones listed as “Sponsored Links“.

Does the business profile of those websites relates to your business?
If yes, keep the phrase but if not ask yourself, are this the right keywords for me?
If I am looking for something related to my business, what will I be searching for?

Repeat the last step for every phrase you have, but don’t forget that search engines ignore words like: is, in, from, for, and, etc..

Eventually, you should be left with probably less than 7 phrases, and going over them again should tell you if they are the right phrases for your website or not.

Now navigate through your website and compare the list that you have with the text available on the home page.
Are any of your most important keywords in your Page Title?
What about the body text of your page?
Are there any headings that contain your keywords?

If your answer is No to any of the questions above, then you need to make changes.

Now remember, trying to conquer the search engines and get the “Google Love“ for a long list in one go will be a mistake, so keep it short and to the point.
You can always create new pages later and link them from your website home page.

Tags: keywords research

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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