KEYWORD research SEO Tip

KEYWORD research

This is the most important step to success.

Before building your site do the research. I like to use the keyword tools provided for free by google. Create an Adwords account and have a look. What ever way you do your research, you need to find the best keywords to get your site ranking well on google.
What are good keywords? Use keywords that are searched for often but have few competitor sites. That is the key. For example, this site. I noticed that the phrase "Web Hosting Site Design" is searched 27,000 times a month, but has low site returns, in other words lots of people using that search string but few sites are showing up in Google.
So I made my sites name www.webhostingsitedesign.co.za. Now if you look at the statistics you will see that a phrase like "web site design" has 450,000 searches a month. This is great except for the fact that is has a huge amount of competitor sites. Its all about finding a good balance.

So to summarise find a few keywords that have a high search rate and low competition site count. Then see which ones are available as domain names, buy the domain name that matches the keyword phrase, that has the best search rate to competition site ratio. You can check and order domain names using this link. This will be your new site's name :)

A few rules when using keywords in your website.

1. Google likes to see search phrases in your website's title. So create a different title for every page in your site. Mix them up, but don't over do it. Google is clever, it will know when you are up to something, when you have 500 words in your title that are all "Web Site Hosting". Keep your title to the point and aim at being helpful to your visitors.
2. Meta description tags. Put a good description explaining your site in your meta description tag. Try and incorporate the search phrases into this tag. Remember like the title, don't over do it. Remember the description tag is the text displayed in Google.
3. First words on your site. Yes ill say it again: FIRST IMPRESSIONS LAST. The very first words posted on your site are more important than the other content that follows. So put your favourite search phrases in the first few words of your site.
4. Headers. These are your "h1", "h2" etc. tags. Google likes these. So try and use them for important words. Again, it wont help if your entire site is in a H1 tag. The trick is to get your search phrases to stand out amongst the other content.
5. Images. Your images allow you to give an alternative text value, called the 'alt' property. So every image on your site should have one of your key search phrases in it's alt properties.
6. Links. Google looks at the text used for a link. So don't use words like "CLICK HERE" in your link. Rather use "If you would like more info on KEY WORD PHRASE click here".
7. URLs. Try use keywords in your file names, example design.html would work better as webdesignandhostingmadeeasy.html.
8. Other highlights. Bolding, Underlining and italicized keywords also make a difference.

Thats it for now, If you would like to get more tips sent to you every month, just give us your email address here.
We chat about IT news, SEO Tips and more fun stuff :)