Choosing Key Phrases

How to Research and Choose Powerful Key Phrases

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Key Phrases Bring Search Engine Power

Concentrate on One or Two Key Phrases 

Keyword selection is a vital part of attracting traffic to each web page.

Many different search phrases will be used by search engine users to find information. To get your share of this traffic, you will be selecting one or two key phrases (call them primary and secondary) for each page of your website. Only when your key phrase matches a user's search phrase can you hope to bring him or her to your site.

Key phrases should not be general phrases, but specific and relevant to your page topic. They should also fit well with your site topic. Choose different key phrases for each page of your website.

If you were to choose more than two key phrases per page, you would reduce the "keyword density" of your page for each key phrase. The search engines would not be able to make a definite connection between the content of your page and any of your key phrases. So you'd rank too low in the search engine results. This is a frequent error of new website owners.

Keyword selection for good search engine rankings

It is usually better to rank well (1-20) for a little-used key phrase than to rank poorly (40-100) for a key phrase that is more popular. A poor rank brings in almost no traffic .

The more powerful, well-established and authoritative sites will be vying for control of the most popular key phrases. Your new site will not be ready to take them on yet.

If your site is highly specialized (perhaps a localized business site), then a very specific key phrase (perhaps 5 or so words) might be just the thing to bring in targeted traffic (visitors who are looking for exactly what you have to offer, in exactly the place you are located).

If your topic is broad, you will still start off, like everyone does, having very little authority with the search engines. So at this stage you want to select less popular key phrases and use them well. (We'll be talking about keyword placement in the next tutorial).

Keyword Selection Research Tools

There are many tools available to help you research your keywords. Some of the best are quite expensive. Google Adwords Keyword Tool is free online, so everyone can access it. For that reason, I'm going to assume you'll be using it too.

Using the Keywords Tool, just type in a few phrases that you think searchers might use to find your page and ask for Keyword Ideas. The Tool will then supply many relevant and irrelevant suggestions.

Change the match type to Exact to get a true estimate of the traffic your key phrases can bring. In Choose Columns to Display, add the average cost-per-click.

Your first task is to ignore the irrelevant suggestions (ones which don't match your page topic well), no matter how appealing their numbers!

When you do this research, you will find that short, relevant key phrases, consisting of one keyword or two, attract a high volume of searchers, but also plenty of competition from web sites who target those lucrative search phrases.

Longer key phrases, consisting of three, four or five keywords get a lot less attention from competing web sites.

For this tutorial, I've used Google's Keyword Tool to search for key phrases related to the term "keyword". (I had to do this work for this page anyway, so I thought I'd share it with you).

Using the Keyword Tool, I look at three columns mainly:

• Advertiser Competition
   

• Global Monthly Search Volume
   

• Estimated Average CPC

Ideal Key Phrase: High volume and Low website competition

I use Google's advertiser competition as a first approximation for website competition, but there is only a tenuous relationship between these two.

I can assess website competition later by searching for my key phrase in Yahoo or Google Search, and checking what comes up. (See First Steps: Finding a website niche for an example of using of  this technique.) I could also use a tool such as SEO Chat's Keyword Difficulty Check.

I hope to find key phrases that have low competition (65% or less) and high search volume (ideally higher than 1000 searches per month), but my success  will depend on the amount of interest in my topic).

I screened out irrelevant suggestions and others with low search volumes. Here is my selection from the actual results:
 

Choosing primary and secondary key phrases

As I expected, the competition for the first few terms is fierce. I'm not going to start there. A possible choice would be "search phrase" with quite a tidy search volume of 18100 per month, and moderate competition at 60%. I think I'll probably make that my secondary key phrase. For my primary key phrase, I'll go for the term "key phrases" with moderate (50%) competition and a search volume of 6600 per month.

These choices will be subject to confirmation by doing an actual search on Search Yahoo or Google for each of my intended key phrases, to make sure of relevance and competition strength. I'll be aiming for a top 20 position for both these key phrases, eventually.

Why did I suggest that "key phrases" should be my primary term and not "search phrase" which had higher volume? Well, I prefer to go for the easy pickings first.

Promoting your secondary key phrase

Later on, when I see how many visitors both of these key phrases are providing, I may switch my primary and secondary terms.  

Or I may ditch my primary "key phrases", promote "search phrase" to become my primary, and make "search keyword" (110 000 searches per month) my new secondary.

When to choose key phrases

That is why I prefer to write my content first, then choose key phrases - rather than choosing the key phrases first and letting them pop out "naturally" while I write.

I write the basic content once, but may adjust the key phrases more than once, to improve traffic flow.

Started with 2 key phrases - now down to 1

Don't forget, it's quite acceptable to have just one key phrase, especially if you struggle to find two good ones.

(In fact, I had to eliminate my secondary key phrase, "search phrase". An actual Google search showed that most of the results were not relevant to the topic of my page. That's really a vital check!)

So how are we going to use the key phrase (or phrases) we've chosen? Where do we put them? That is the subject of our next tutorial...

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Links / Resources

Keyword Selection Research Tools:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

WordTracker: Free keyword suggestion tool



Rapid Keyword

Keyword Density Analyser

Keyword Difficulty Check






























































































































More Articles on Choosing Keywords:

Dave Riches: Choosing Keywords

Build Websit4U: Choosing Keywords

Yahoo Help: Choosing Keywords


 

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Copyright © 2009 EasyWebsitePrimer.com             Last updated: 01 AUG 2009

Good keyword selection means choosing key phrases for optimum search engine power