SEO Resources - Frequently Asked Questions
What Should I Keep in Mind when Selecting Keywords?
Keyword selection is one of the most basic and important facets of any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign. It is the first step, and it is quite possibly the most important. The right keywords can mean success while the wrong ones spell failure. So how do you know the difference?
The answer: reSearch. Tied to this is knowing your user or market. What Search terms will people look for your service with? Are those the keywords you are targeting with your pages? It's vastly important to pick keywords that people will actually be using to Search for the good, service, information or whatever else it is that you are offering through your web site. Namely, you've got to pick popular keywords. The means to finding them are plentiful. Various services are available, both free and paid, as SEO continues to grow as a business and issue on the Internet.
But what about keywords that are too competitive? Well, there is a fine line between good popular keywords and keywords that are so highly targeted that no matter how well you optimize you'll be stuffed hundreds of rankings below the top in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Surely if you offer 'web design' services you can imagine the competition for that keyword. To bank on it would mean a very difficult if not impossible SEO task.
The best way to ascertain how popular a Search term is to utilize WordTracker or one of the various similar services that index how many users Search with each term or phrase. Some of them, including WordTracker, also track how much Pay-Per-Click (PPC) competition there is for a particular keyword or phrase. While PPC measurements don't also directly reflect the amount of SEO competition, and should therefore be taken with a grain of salt, they are still a good way to estimate just how popular a term is and whether too many web pages are already competing for high SERP rankings for that keyword or phrase.
CONTENT DICTATES
Something else you should surely keep in mind is that no matter how good a keyword is in terms of popularity and competition it will do you no good if it is not relevant to your content. Namely, Google and other Search Engines evaluate your pages in their entirety for their relevant content. Keywords that do not have to do with the content of your site should be avoided. They will do you more harm than good, and if Google or another Search Engine flags you for spamming you could end up banned from their index.
Another content consideration when dealing with keywords is the keyword density. A rather self-explanatory term, keyword density refers to the percentage of words in your HTML code that are targeted keywords. basically, you want to strike a happy medium between having too few target keywords in your body text and being flagged for "spam" pages by a Search Engine. There is debate as to what the optimal density percentage is, but most estimates place it around 15%.
Also, keep in mind that your keywords should be included in your <title> tags when you settle on them. Each page should have its own unique set of target keywords, and once you've made the optimal choices available to you these should be included in the title tags of each page.
