If you imagine that building an optimized site is like cooking a meal Womens Lamar Jackson Jersey , then keywords are the essential ingredients. Would you attempt to cook a complex new dish without first referring to a recipe? Would you start before you had all the ingredients available and properly prepared?
In our analogy, key words are your ingredients and the rest of the guide (after this part) is your recipe. It is vital that you start by investing time in key word research. This may surprise you, but I would recommend you spend at least 25% of your time on this activity alone! That's 25% of all your time, including the time you spend designing your site, building it, optimising and promoting it! Quite an investment Womens Hayden Hurst Jersey , eh? But believe me, if you din't get this part right your meal will not be a very satisfying one and no-one will want to eat it!
(a) What are your 10 key words?
You may think you know straight off. You are likely to be right about most of them but you will almost certainly make three common mistakes. Firstly, you will tend to pick single words (rather than chains of words). Secondly, you will tend to pick the same words used by other people. Thirdly, you will compound this by overusing these key words on your site and underusing related key words. The result will be a poor finished product and sub-optimal ranking or traffic.
So please be patient and walk through the following steps. From part two, you will remember Doug (who sells antique doors Womens Justin Tucker Jersey , door handles, knockers, door bells or pulls and fitting services).
Like Doug, you should start with a visit to the Overture Keyword Selector Tool (which I recommend in preference to Wordtracker, which is a paid service, and the Google Adwords: Keyword Suggestion Tool Trace McSorley Jersey , which does not indicate the popularity count of each search phrase). This tool allows you to check for recent word search combinations (and their derivatives) on the Overture search engine, returning search frequencies for each.
Doug enters "antique doors" and is surprized to find that "antique door knob" and "antique door hinge" score higher than "antique door knocker" (his best selling product in the high street store). But far higher still is the category level combination "antique door hardware". He had never guessed searchers could be so savvy.
Next he tries "antique door knocker" and finds a single derivative "antique brass door knocker". He had not thought seriously about making brass a keyword. Now it is pencilled in on his list.
Trying "antique door bell" and playing around, he discovers "antique door chime" is about as popular (reflecting a difference between UK and US english). This is also very enlightening, as he is hoping to sell to the US audience by mail order.
Perhaps you begin to see my point. As you will see later in the guide, I recommend a separate page for each product, service or information topic on your site. Through your Overture search Iman Marshall Jersey , you should come up with an "A" list of about 10 key words for each page. At least four of them are likely to be site-wide in their applicability and common to each page. The remaining six will be page-specific. Put any left-over words onto a second page entitled "B" list.
In Doug's example, he decides he wants antique, door, brass and hardware on each page in the site. On the door knocker page, he wants (in addition) the key words knocker, iron Ben Powers Jersey , decorative, engraved, pineapple and lion.
You too should do the same. If you find this activity overly difficult, can I suggest you revisit your proposition? It is quite possible you have not yet properly thought that through!
(b) Which key words do your competitors use?
Through searching for door knockers on Google and focusing on the top 15 results, Doug brings up their pages. He uses the menu option "view-source" in Internet Explorer to look at the key words used in the page metadata.
He is surpised to find some consistent themes. For example, almost all of the sites he finds whilst searching for "door knockers" also include "door knobs" in their metadata for that page. He also finds that several have used old as one of their kewords Justice Hill Jersey , in addition to antique.
Don't read me wrong here. Metadata (particularly in isolation) is not the route to high search engine rankings (as you will see later). However, top 10 sites generally have done well with their optimization more generally (and their metadata is likely to reflect quality keyword analysis, repeated throughout the site in other ways).
Another key tool is the Google Smackdown, permitting you to compare the overall frequency of two competing keyword sets across the whole of Google's results. Doug compares "antique door knob" with "antique door knocker" and finds the former is hugely overrepresented on the web compared to the latter (with over 2,000 results vs. under 200). He knows that knob is not searched on ten times more (from his earlier work) so decides to concentrate on knocker as a word where he has less competition.
However, Doug confirms the effectiveness of all competitor combinations using the Overture tool and revises his list to include some of these new words Miles Boykin Jersey , relegating "pineapple" and "lion" to his B-list, in favour of "old" and "knobs".
(c) How many related keywords can you identify?
Now for an important third step. Navigate your browser to the GoRank Ontology Finder - Related Keywords Lookup Tool. Like Doug, try entering "antique door knocker" and look at the results. For "antique", the tool suggests related keywords of old, classic, antique Jaylon Ferguson Jersey , furniture, vintage, rare, victorian, antiques, collectible.
Hmmm. Now he can see why his competitors use old in their list! Doug runs these related words back through the Overture tool and finds that "Victorian door" yields some decent results Marquise Brown Jersey , so adds Victorian and Edwardian to his B-list (something he had never thought of previously).