Mar
2
Are you taking the advantage of search engines to bring new visitors to your site? When designing a new page do you do a technical keyword analysis, and build the page for targeted keywords? I will be teaching you how to do proper Keyword Analysis for your web pages. Keyword analysis is much easier than it sounds, and it will help your site to increase its targeted visitors. Let’s start step by step.
Pick the Top-Level Keyword for your page
This is the smartest approach. Before getting into details, choose your most general, top-level keyword. Let’s choose a random topic website, and use the examples from that website for our article. Let’s say we have have decided to build an auction site similar to eBay. In this case, our top-leve keyword is "Auction" or "Auctions". Remember search engines treat singular and plural words seperately. So you have to have seperate plans for singular and plural keywords. There is not a tool in the market to help you to choose the top-level keyword. For very general topics like auctions, it is easy to define the top-level keyword, for more specific topics, try to choose the most general keyword as your top-level keyword. Ok, we have chosen our top-level keyword, and we are ready to start our analysis. Let’s start with vertical and lateral keyword analysis.
Vertical and Lateral Keyword Analysis
Vertical Keyword Analysis
Vertical Keyword Analysis generates all forms of the top-level keyword (singular, plural) including all the popular variations. Vertical Analysis needs a good combination of statistical data. You can always guess, and go with trial-erro method, but it is much easier to do your analysis with a tool. Wordtracker is the most popular keyword analysis tool for SEO in the market. If you visit their website http://www.wordtracker.com/ you can use the online trial version whenever you want. Trial version has limited results, and it analyzes less data than the professional version, but it would work pretty good for small websites. Another great and free tool is offered by Overture, you can simply type your top-level keyword and Overture Keyword Tool generates all the vertical keywords associated with your top-level keyword along with the number of searches done. You can use Overture Keyword Selector Tool for free. I use both Overture and Digitalpoint keyword suggestion tools. Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool gives you results both from Wordtracker and Overture.
Ok, let’s go back to our top-level keyword. We chose "auctions" and using the tools we’ve mentioned above, I’ve a list of vertical keyword suggestions. Below is the "Vertical Keywords" for top-level keyword "auction" generated by Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool.
Lateral Keyword Analysis
Lateral Keyword Analysis is similar to Vertical Analysis if conducted with tools. But first you have to understand the philosophy behind it. Ask this question to your friends:
If you were searching for this product, what might you type into a search engine?
Believe me, you will get different answers from different people, but important part is to focus on most common lateral keywords. If it is not clear enough, don’t worry, examples will help you to understand it better. If our top-level keyword was "Basketball" what would be some good laterak keywords? Here’s a list in my mind (without using a tool):
NBA
NCAA
Kobe Bryant
Allstar Game
New York Knicks
LA Lakers
None of these keywords has "basketball" in them, but with the help of lateral keywords, you can focus on more targeted users, possibly with more chance of success. So let’s get back to our example, I’ve put our top-level keyword "auction" in Wordtracker keyword analysis tool, and I get these lateral keyword suggestions:
For a top-level keyword "auction" or "auctions", I never thought "antiques" would be this popular. I had some keywords in mind such as ebay, bid, online auctions, bidding etc. but now I have a list of keywords generated for me and I can work with proven data to choose the right keywords for my site.
Choose Your Main and Secondary Keywords
Choosing the Main Keyword
Starting with one top-level keyword, now we have a number of keywords to work with. What should be your criteria for choosing the right main and secondary keywords? Unless you are an SEO expert, never target the most competitive keywords.
Definition of More Competitive and Less Competitive Keywords :
Other than the minor details, you have to focus on 2 major data. First, how many times a day this specific keyword is being searched? First image (created by DigitalPoint Tool) shows how many times a day a keyword is being searched. More search means more competitive. In this case, "auctions" keyword is being searched for around 6,694 times a day (Wordtracker’s data). Also remember, Overture data does not seperate singular and plural forms of the keyword. So you wouldn’t want to target "auctions" as your primary keyword. By focusing on less competitive keywords, you have a greater chance to succeed (to get high search engine results). Second criteria for competitiveness is how many pages are indexed for this specific keyword. On Google for example, if I type "auctions" I get over 30 million pages which proves that "auctions" keyword is highly competitive.
Now we know which keywords are more competitive and which ones are less competitive. A right keyword me doesn’t have to be a right one for you. There are many outside effects involved. After reviewing my site’s features, future plans, potential and my SEO experiences, in this case I have decided to target "online auctions" as my main keyword. Even though it is highly competitive, I will have a plan to reach high rankings with my main keyword.
Choosing the Secondary Keywords
Since I have chosen my main keyword as "online auctions", now I go back to one of the tools (I will use DigitalPoint again), and do the same analysis. Now my top-level keyword is "online auctions", and Digital Point Tool has generated these suggestions for "online auctions"
Now instead of making up some secondary keywords in my mind and targeting them, I know which keywords people search, and how many times a day they search them. Going through the results, and searching each word at respective search engines ( I search at Google), I finally choose my secondary keywords as:
Free Online Auctions
Online Auto Auctions
Online Art Auctions
Usually around 2-4 secondary keywords for a page is pretty good. Now I know what to focus when I start designing my page and writing content for it.
Conclusion
It is very important to know your main and seondary keywords before you start designing a page. Especially before starting your back link campaign, you have to choose your target keywords. Now I know my main and secondary keywords, and I have reasonable expectations for them. After this intensive research, I will start my page design, and then will focus on back link and other online promoting campaigns.
Choosing the right keywords is the biggest step to SEO. Without knowing your goals, targets, you cannot be successful. Now we have our target keywords, and my goal is to reach #1 position with the keyword "online auctions". I will be writing about "Search Engine Optimized Web Design" and "Back Link Campaigns", and hopefully try to help you to achieve highest rankings in SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).
Today’s Quote
Every true genius is bound to be naive.
Friedrich von Schiller
Comments
5 Responses to “Keyword Analysis - Choosing the Right Keywords”
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Nice article Matt, thanks for the links. I will have to give those tools a closer look.
Beautiful article Matt. I think it will be very helpful for everybody trying to promote his/her web site.
On a second reading of the article some questions occurred:
1) How many words should be the level keyword? Do I have to choose only one word or it can be a word phrase too?
2) While writing the content should I use the main and the secondary keywords in the title tag, meta-tags (description and keywords) and in the content of the page. Should I repeat the main and the secondary keywords as much as possible in the content of the page? I will appreciate some tips of how to write quality content of the web site provided that we already determined our targeted keywords.
Thank you for your questions ecrater. About your first question; Number of words in top level keyword/keyphrase can be different for each page. Usually my suggestion is try to choose max. 3 word keyphrases. But it totally depends on your target. One or two word keyphrases are more competitive in nature. But specific cases you have to have more than 3 word keyphrases, e.g. “Real Estate Agent Albany New York” would be a very popular keyphrase in your market, and this can be your target top-level keyword.
Your second question is about meta tags and keyword density. I’d highly recommend using your main keyword in your title and also try to add your secondary keywords, or a combination. When writing content, it’s important to use your target keywords but there are more details for this topic, and I will be writing another article about “Keyword Density” very soon since this is an important part of on page optimization.
Thank you for your interest in Daily SEO. I will try to keep as much fresh content as possible here with news, articles and tutorials from SEO world.
Nice article. I am trying out your suggestions.