Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Marketing

Web Site Development

 

Keyword analysis

Finding the right keywords for you website is crucial to the success of your SEO efforts. Choosing the wrong keywords or phrases could mean that your either trying to compete with well established sites that will not relinquish their positions easily or you choose keywords that real people are not using. Either way your efforts will not draw in the required traffic.

Brain storming keywords

To compile a keyword list, start by analyzing the products or services which the website offers; create a list of probable keywords with the most relevant and what you consider popular first. Consider adding inflection and orthographic variations to the top few keywords/phrases.

• Inflections: variations on tense, pluralisation or focus. i.e. Drive, Driven, Drove, Driver, Drivers, Driving etc.
• Orthographic variation: Different names for the same object or actions. i.e. trainer, sneakers, sport shoes.

One thing to consider when building a list of keywords is that keywords in isolation may be discounted by search engines if the keywords appear out of place; for this reason and many others you should try to build a strong theme for your site. To find associated keywords use a tool like the Google keyword suggest (part of google ad sense) to find any keywords that the search engines may find associated or there are many other online services which find associated keywords, my favorite is digitalpoint keyword suggest.

By now you should have a pretty comprehensive list of keywords. If you want to add more words, use related keywords from web sites that are returned when you enter the top few keywords in your list.

Popularity

With many of the keyword suggestion tools you will also get an indication of the popularity of those words/phrases. Digitalpoint gives both Wordtracker and Overture results. Use this value to order your current list in most popular keywords first, remember that the figures given are an estimate of keyword impressions from previously collected data, this is especially important if your keywords are seasonally based.

Even though the impression figures are estimated and do not cover every search on every search engine, it is better to identify words and phrases which are proven, rather than words or phrases which you conjure up from gut feeling.

Competition

For new web site this is particularly important, but even if your site has been around for some time and already has a PageRank, choosing to compete against sites that are well established and popular will prove to be an extremely difficult task, also choosing to compete against sites with little influence may put you in top position quickly, but are you achieving your full potential?

To find the market where you ought to be competing, we suggest that you attempt to estimate you future PageRank and then estimating the position within the SERPs where you would fall. i.e. if your site is new and is not yet indexed by Google then your best guess would be that in six months your site will be PR 1; if your site has been indexed for at least 6 months but you have no PageRank then you could guess at PR2; if your site has just achieved PR1 and has been around for 6 months to a year then a good guess would be PR2; if your site has been PR1 for about 3 months already then it may achieve PR3 in 6 months; if your site has PR2 then a good estimate might be PR3 in 6 - 12 months or if your site is PR3 then PR4 may take 1-2 years. This is by no means a definitive guide to PR progression, just simple observations of growth over time.

Now iterate through your keywords and locate the top web site with your predicted future PR, this is the position estimate for a 6 month projection. Group your keyword performance estimate by 0-10, 11-20, 21-30 and 30+. Now divide the impression figure for the keyword/phrase by 2 for the 0-10, 3 for 11-20, 4 21-30 and 5 for 30+, this should now produce an ordered list of keywords which can be used to select relevant keywords. The method stated here is somewhat primitive and you may want to refine the selection process, but remember that any process which involves human behavior is never 100% accurate, this is not an exact science, just a logical ordering system.

The final stage of keyword ordering is to remove any stopwords or poison words. Stopwords are words such as 'and','when','where' etc. Any word which is commonly used in normal text; basically words which search engines aren't interested in because they are too common to be descriptive. Poison words are slightly more difficult to identify but again, one rule is, if a word is very common in online terms, such as 'links', 'submit' and 'home', then it may be considered as a poison word. If you site is not intended for an adult audience then you should not use any words which may be related to the adult theme.

Although in the previous paragraphs we have made reference to Google PageRank to compare competitive ranking. Most other substantial search engines have similar ranking methods, including sandboxes and penalties: For instance we launched some new web pages on an existing site about a year ago; for the first month Yahoo gave good positions for the the keywords used, until one single day all pages dropped dramatically for all keywords. Over the following months a consistent effort was applied to build links and improve overall search engine optimisation, until after a period of around six months the results began to rise rapidly (not as quick as they dropped but noticeably quick). We assume that this was caused by a form of sandbox penalty.

Selecting Keywords

By following the guides above, you should now have an ordered list of Keywords. The keyword list should be sorted into an order which gives the keywords which should give the most traffic. This list should not be taken as absolute, but a systematic guide to choosing keywords over a gut feeling method.

Now select 3 primary keywords from the top 6 in your list, ensuring that they are directly related to your site/page. Next choose 3 secondary keywords which are also directly related but words which you consider to be less important. Finally choose 6 more keywords which will act as supporting keywords, these have to be related to the keywords used in the primary and secondary list; use a keyword suggest tool to ensure that they are related in terms of search engine indexers not your personal association.

Retain the full list as you may want to include some of these words in your page text. The reason we have ordered the list is for prioritizing keyword placement and not to exclude less prominent words.