Successful SEO campaigns - keyword Research

In this article, I will discuss an important SEO tactic. I will discuss the importance of “Keyword research” tactic, why you should spend all this time and resources on it, where can you find best keywords and key-phrases, common mistakes in keyword selection and how can you build successful and effective keyword research.

The importance of “keyword research” SEO technique

Keyword research is considered one of the most important SEO tactics. If you select poor keywords and key-phrases, all your SEO efforts will be lost. So SEO experts say that you have to spend 20% of your SEO efforts on just “keyword research” tactics.
SEO experts consider keywords and key-phrases like ingredients for your recipe. If you select poor ingredients, you will get a bad taste.
You need “keyword research” tactics to achieve a lot of the following:

• Choose the best and most relevant domain name that fits your business and brand.
• Rename your website files and directories accordingly
• Rename your pages titles ,headlines, anchor text, and meta tags (on page optimization) to fit with your selected kywords
• Build your website structure
• Build your build linking campaign (off page optimization)

Where can you find the best keywords and keyphrases?

You can find the best keywords and keyphrases in a lot of places like the following:

• Using Google analytics: you can detect the keywords and keyphrases that customers reach your website with. You can detect keywords which were used on Google and get those customers for your website. [I will discuss Google analytics in another article in detail]
• Web server log: you can use it to detect the best keywords and keyphrases
• Your competitor websites: you can do that by two methods:
•  Manual method: click view source on your competitor pages. And see their title tags, Meta keywords, Meta description and headlines.
• Automatic method: the web has a lot of web based and free tools that you can use to get relevant  and related keywords : Adwords keyword tool
• Wordtracker.com: this paid service is great to research more keywords for your marketing campaigns.

Common mistakes in keyword research

• Focusing on the wrong keywords that customers are not using to reach similar products and services online.
• Keyword stuffing – overusing specific keywords on your page.
• Focus all your keyword research efforts with single keywords. The researches approved that just 20% of the searchers use single keywords to search the web. But 80% of searchers used more than one keyword to search. This means you are better off focusing on long tail key-phrases.
• Target difficult keywords in their SEO campaign that most people don’t use it in their searches.

How to build successful and effective keyword research

 This is the most important section in this article. I will How can you conduct an effective keyword research campaign. Your goal is to find the most relevant keywords and key-phrases that customers use to search for your business, product and services. In the same time these keywords should have less competition as well.

Table (1) – keyword research
In the following steps, I’m going to demonstrate to you how to manipulate table-1 to get the best keywords and key-phrases to use in your SEO campaigns.

• Keyword discovery (A)

In this stage you have to get all the keywords and key-phrases related to your business, products and services. You can get these keywords by different means:

• Your competitor’s websites: click view source on your competitor’s pages. And see their title tags, Meta keywords, Meta description and headlines. You can do this action on all their pages. Also you can use  Automatic method by adding your competitor’s website links on web based keywords tools like Adwords keyword tool, and then get all relevant and related keywords and key-phrases.
• Use web based keyword Research tools such as wordtracker and Adwords keyword tool| to get related keywords for your business.
• You have to add commonly used search phrases (which searchers combine to what they search about like cheap, free, discount, etc) to your keywords.
• It’s good idea to have long phrases which have a lot of targeted keywords in your selected keywords in column A.
• Keyword popularity P(monthly searches)
• In the previous stage we select all possible keywords and key-phrases. In this stage we will see which keywords from column A are more popular. Which keywords are customers actually searching for? We can use a lot of web based free tools like wordtracker and Adwords keyword tool to get search statistics on every keyword in column A and write your results in column B.
• Keyword completion c (# of indexed pages which contain this keyword )
• Keyword completion (column C) is the number of pages on the internet which have your targeted keyword and indexed on search engines. You can get this number for every keyword on (column A) by searching for it on Google box.
• Keyword opportunity index (KEI)
• The last stage is to calculate which keyword is more effective than others. You can calculate that by this equation P^2/C. then you can sort the KEI column. At this point you have a column that has the most effective keywords and key-phrases you can and should use to build successful SEO campaigns.

Summary

In this article, I discussed the importance of “Keyword research”, why you should spend all this time and resources on it, where can you find best keywords and key-phrases, common mistakes in keyword selection and how can you build successful and effective keyword research.