Have you picked your keywords?

When talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the overall discussion wraps around one thing, keywords we target. Not everyone that starts a website starts it with SEO in mind, but this does not mean that you can’t improve your websites SEO as time passes and your SEO knowledge grows.

When you already start thinking about optimizing your website for search engines the first thing you think about is keywords, and thats your first step to SEO is picking your keywords for which you want to compete in the SERPs.

The idea about this seo article came from Catherine Lawson’s (thank you) comment on my Q1 2008 SEO Goals where Catherin stated that her Q1 2008 SEO Goal is to find a medium happy keyword to target to gain more targeted organic traffic. Now, to gain targeted traffic means to gain visitors that are looking for a specific keyword (or phrase) on the search engines, in other words Catherine wants to pick a keyword, and if you permit me I want to help you out by guiding you to the right direction.

Pick your keyword

The first thing I note on Catherine’s business blog is that she is using on her blogs homepage as title the title of her latest blog post, and the same happens even on her categories (ex. affiliate marketing, business ideas, business marketing etc.), all this makes so difficult for Catherine’s blog to rank for the appropriate and targeted keywords with her categories, as well as with her homepage, so lets pick your keywords Catherine.

Using a free tool (tools which can give you a clue of how many searches are being performed for a certain keyword) such as Wordtrackers Keyword Tool which is a web based keyword suggestion tool or you can use GoodKeywords desktop keyword suggestion tool which relies to Yahoo’s overture tool. Once we got the tools we need to define the niche of Catherine’s blog, Business. So writing down the core keyword “business” we will receive a good list of alternative suggested keywords which we can pick and target, keywords like

• Business
• Business Blog
• Small Business
• Business Ideas
• Internet Business
• Business Woman

These are just few of the keywords I picked, some are competitive and with HIGH search volume while the others are less competitive and with smaller search volume. From the given keywords (or other keywords you might want to pick) you can make a good combination to target several keywords by just optimizing your title. Make sure some are less competitive and others high competitive to target in the near feature.

Here is an example of title Catherine could use for her business blog based on only those keywords, “Small Business Ideas Blog from a Business Woman” or rather “Small Business Ideas Blog | Business Woman”. With a similar title Catherine would be able to target several keywords just with her blogs homepage, here is a short combination list

• Business
• Small Business
• Business Blog
• Small Business Blog
• Business Ideas (even tho rather would target this keyword in the proper category)
• Small Business Ideas
• Business Woman

Another advise I would give to Catherine is to make sure that each category uses it’s proper keywords in the title tag, rather than using the latest posts title. And since just the use of keywords in title tag won’t bring you to the first pages of the SERPs power up your site with some backlinks that use your keywords as anchor text.

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