Keyword Analysis
The Art of Keyword Analysis - How to choose Powerful Key Phrases
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Keyword Analysis
Why choose keywords?
Keyword analysis and selection is a vital part of attracting traffic to your web page.
Each of your web pages should have one (or at most, two) keyword phrases which are consistently used throughout its text, headings and title. Because the keyword phrase is so prominent on your web page, search engines learn to associate it with your page.
When your keyword phrase (also called keyword or key phrase) matches a user's search phrase, your web page is eligible to be listed in the search engine's result pages. Where in those result pages it appears (how high up) will depend on many factors, which we will explore a little later.
Keyword Basics
Keyword phrases should not be general, but specific and highly relevant to your page topic. They should also fit well with your site topic. Choose different keyword 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.
Then you'd rank too low in the search engine results. This is a frequent error of new website owners.
If you choose two key phrases for a page, decide which one is primary, and which is secondary. When placing your keywords on the page (see next tutorial), you give preference to the primary key phrase.
One keyword phrase is entirely acceptable, and may even be better than two, in most cases.
Keyword analysis for good search engine rankings
It is usually better to rank well (1-20) for a little-used keyword phrase than to rank poorly (above 40) for a very popular phrase. 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 keyword phrases. Only a mature and well-linked site will be able to compete with them.
If your site is highly specialized (perhaps a localized business site), then a very specific keyword 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.
Keyword Analysis 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 Keyword Tool, just type in a few phrases that you think searchers might use to find your page, then 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 associated with your key phrase.. 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!
Keyword Analysis - The ideal keyword
The ideal keyword (or keyword phrase) has
- a high search volume
- a high commercial potential (people who use this keyword are willing to spend money)
- very little competition (or none) from other websites
The ideal keyword happens very rarely, and then only fleetingly! If the volume is high and the commercial potential is good, you can bet there will soon be lots of competition from other websites.
Keyword Analysis - Realistic Targets
Search volumes vary from very low to millions per month. I suggest you choose key phrases whose monthly search volume is between 2 000 and 50 000, if you can. Lower than 2 000 will bring little traffic. More than 50 000 and the competition is likely to be severe.
To assess a key phrase's commercial potential, see how much advertisers are willing to spend to place their advertisements in the search results for that key phrase. Googl'es Estimated Average Pay-Per-Click is a great indication. Prices range from US $0.05 to over $10.00. I recommend you choose keywords with a PPC of at least $1.00, if you can.
For most website owners, commercial potential is of more than passing interest. For example, you may want to place Google advertisements on your web page. If you do, each click on your ad will earn you a proportion (perhaps 25%) of the PPC amount paid by the advertiser.
If commercial potential is not relevant to your web page then you can ignore it, or even deliberately choose keywords with a low PPC. That may place you in a less competitive area, which you can quickly dominate.
Assessing website competition
You can have the greatest keyword in the world, with huge traffic. But if you only rank in 150th position in Google for that keyword, you will get no share of that traffic.
Your actual position will depend largely on the strength of the competition.
The most reliable way to assess the competition is to study the search engine results for the keyword phrase you have in mind. Asses the top 10 or 20 entries. Web page strength is indicated by (in descending order of importance):
- Wikipedia, government organisations, universities, hospitals, etc.
- Pages with a strong (4 or higher) Google Page Rank (use a tool that displays PR).
- Pages from a site whose URL ends in .org
- Pages with your key phrase in their website title (very strong)
- Pages with your key phrase in their website domain name (very strong)
- Pages with your key phrase in their web page title
- Pages with your key phrase in their web page URL
Look for the first two weak entries (that do not have any of the strong points in the list above). That will give you an indication of where you might expect your website to rank in the search engine result pages. (In time, you have a chance to replace a weak entry.)
For another approach, try Seo Chat's Keyword Difficulty Check tool. You enter a keyword phrase and it calculates a difficulty index, from 0 to 100. Expect anything over 60% to be hard.
Don't use the Advertiser Competition column in the Adwords Keyword Tool to indicate website competition. It doesn't always correlate well.
Long-tail key phrases
When you do keyword analysis, 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 websites which target those lucrative search phrases.
Longer key phrases, consisting of three, four or five keywords get a lot less attention from competing web sites.
When to choose key phrases
I prefer to write my content first, then do my keyword analysis, rather than choosing the key phrases first and letting them pop out "naturally" while I write.
This way, my writing is not constrained by the need to work around a key phrase. It does mean that I have to fit my keyword phrase/s into my page afterwards, but that's not hard.
Although I write the basic content once, I may adjust the keywords more than once, if I see a way to improve targeted traffic to my page.
But this is just a personal preference. If you prefer to do your keyword analysis first, then that's what you should do.
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...
Links / Resources
Keyword Analysis Research Tools:
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
WordTracker: Free keyword suggestion tool
Rapid Keyword
Keyword Density Analyser
Keyword Difficulty Check
More articles on Keyword Analysis:
Dave Riches: Choosing Keywords
Build Websit4U: Choosing Keywords
Yahoo Help: Choosing Keywords
Create Content: Keyword Analysis Top Prev Next: Keyword Placement
Copyright © 2009 - 2011 EasyWebsitePrimer.com Last updated: September 2011
Good keyword analysis helps you find key phrases to harness search engine power