Keyword Optimization

Why is Keyword Optimization so important when it comes to Internet Marketing? If you have read our post on Search Engines and how they work, you’ll have a better understanding of why keywords are important. But in short, when a search engine is busy crawling sites, it picks up on keywords and gather as much information on your site it possibly can.

The information is then sent to indexing where your keywords will be used to index your site’s content accordingly.  Without the right keywords, your pages won’t get indexed properly. Your web pages won’t show up in search results where you want them and you won’t see any visitors or traffic coming in.

What are some of the benefits of Keyword Optimization?

• Drive more traffic to your website
• Keywords used in effective content helps users to connect with potential clients
• To measure the traffic potential

When Optimizing Keywords what do you need to assess?

The first thing is to analyze the competitiveness of the keyword you want to rank for. The higher the competition, harder it is to target and rank for. It’s not impossible but you are going to have a lot of hard work on your hands unless you use a trusted SEO Service. Getting an SEO audit for your website is always also a great idea.

Popularity of the keyword depends on which words  or phrases people use to search most. How relevant is your keyword to your product or service? Linking keywords to irrelevant content can actually do more harm than good to your web pages.  You also need to try and identify the intent of the searchers; are they there for information, to purchase anything or just browsing around?

While paying attention to keyword placement, don’t forget that good quality content should be your top priority, not keyword stuffing.

Which keywords should I target?

This is something you can do yourself without the help of an SEO specialist. Luckily there are numerous free keyword search tools that can assist you in finding the best keywords to use. One in particular is Google Adwords’ Keyword planner tool. There are two main purposes of this tool:

1. It gives you an estimated amount of the monthly searches for specific keywords
2. It helps you with keyword ideas

There are a few things you also need to understand before using this tool:

• The tool should only be used as a guideline. The information isn’t 100% accurate and won’t give the correct figure of visits you might get when you rank at the top for a specific keyword.
• There are numerous versions of Google, depending on the country you are in. The target country you want to rank for can be set using Google Webmaster Tools. The chances are high that you will most likely only rank highly in one version (country) of Google depending on the location you are targeting. To rank globally is not impossible, though.
• Keyword Competitiveness. A lot of people make the mistake in thinking that they can check the competitiveness of a keyword by just doing a search. Doing this might give them 50 million results, but this does not mean that the pages brought up from the search are trying to rank for the same keywords.

Once you have your keywords the next stage would be the placement of those keywords. This we have outlined for you in our post on where to place your keywords for maximum SEO Effect.