Integrated Digital Marketing

SEOKeyword Research & Head & Body Recommendation

Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Phrase Research is a process of selecting the most “optimum performance” keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. You may have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking with the major search engines, yet it will all amount to a big waste if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. It’s like not being able to reach your destination even after running your best race because you started out on the wrong road. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Therefore, the foremost step in any SEO campaign is identifying your target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site like yours.

Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization

A common pitfall is to start the website optimization exercise with a set of “gut-feel” keyword phrases. Site owners often come up with ‘common sense looking’ key phrases, which though look obvious, may not match with the ones your buyers are using as their search term. Very often, being from within the trade narrows the vision and you tend to assume that trade-specific terms are easily understood and popularly used. Not so. You need to think out of the box.Doing Keyword Research invariably means departing from one’s gut-feel and going by the facts. ‘Facts are sacred’ in website optimization as they provide the exact data of what people are actually searching for, thus saving you from starting on a wild goose chase. As mentioned earlier, targeting the wrong key phrases might get you a good ranking for keywords that have few or no search requests or just get you irrelevant junk traffic. So, how does one get the facts and the data regarding a particular search term? There are several online keyword research tools like Google Keyword Suggest, which offer data pertaining to your search term. Relying on search tools to analyze keyword phrase data helps you to get a grip on your target audience.

Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Research process involves the following important steps. These steps can be described as:

• Discovering Keywords• Analyzing Keywords• Selecting Keywords• Deploying Keywords

The Discovering phase should focus on identifying as many keywords as possible that are related to your website and target audience. The Analysis phase involves adding information about existing competition; PageRank based limitations and potential for ranking. The Selection process involves objective measurement based short listing of keywords keeping the site focus and target audience within the limitations analyzed. The Deploying phase is about making optimum use of your selected keywords on your website copy , HTML code and tags.

Keyword Research Process

Title Tag: A Title Tag of about 90 characters, inclusive of your most important keywords is good enough. For instance, the Title Tag of this session would be written as “Keyword Research : Techniques for keyword research, keyword analysis & keyword optimization”.

Meta Description Tag: You should write a Meta Description Tag of about 250 characters with your important keywords. Be careful about over-repetition. For instance, the Description tag of this session would be written as: “Keyword research described: Learn all about keyword research, keyword analysis, keyword optimization and marketing keyword research.”

Head & Body Recommendations

Headlines: Keyword rich headlines and sub-headings placed in <H1> and <H2> tags, not only give a brief preview of what follows in the body copy, but also pass the most relevant information on the page or the subsequent paragraph. For instance, heading of this article can read: Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization; followed by a sub-heading: Importance of Keyword Research for Search Engine OptimizationBody Text: Headlines in <H1> and <H2> Tags followed by keyword rich body text can improve your ranking chances. Alt text / Alt Tag: Important keywords can be used in the text that appears when you bring your mouse over an image on a web page.Title Attributes: The title attributes, are short descriptions for the hyperlinks telling the users about the content of the landing page. Make use of your important keywords here.Anchor Text: The words that appear within the hyperlinked portion of the text are called Anchor Text. Keywords appearing in the Anchor Text have a high relevance weight in Search Engines. File Name: your page’s file name or URL also makes use of the most important keyword. For example, file name for this session should read: keyword-research-session.htm

Head & Body Recommendations

Don’t get swayed by the Keyword Density formula many SEO experts profess, it’s just over hyped. Though you may find a number of articles written on the importance of keyword density, we don’t think it is mission critical. Write your language naturally while leveraging higher use of the keywords in places where it can be used, like substituting keywords in places of articles like ‘it’, ‘this’, etc.

The Title or the Description of your web page should not read like a thesaurus or a collection of keywords, but should be descriptive and enticing enough to make a user click on it and read further. It is important to note that our findings on user behavior have proved that sometimes a site ranking number 5th in Search Engines has drawn more clicks than a poorly titled site ranking number 1 in SERP. For instance, instead of simply writing ‘wisdom tooth extraction’, a title that reads ‘painless wisdom tooth extraction’ which is inclusive of your USP would result in enticing more users to click on your entry

Avoiding Pitfalls

Place your keywords throughout the page, rather than just at the top, but be very very careful about over-repetition, as search engines would consider that as Spamming.

The whole idea behind the Keyword Research exercise is traffic optimization, not traffic maximization. In a nutshell, a good Keyword Research helps in bringing qualified traffic to your site that leads to high sales conversions, by being focused and targeting specific search terms.

Avoiding Pitfalls

Why?

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Thank You!