Pick a word, any word

What is a keyword?

A keyword is the word that will open the door for your customer. There are millions of websites that contain billions of text. So when you set out to search for information or a particular product, you pass a text string to a search engine which then goes through the mud of the text to find the best match. The more ‘keywords’ we put in the search box, the more refined our returned result will be.

The long and short of it

When we created these ‘word strings’, to put them in our search box, they are what are known as long tail keywords if they understood 4-6 words. Surprise surprise, Less than 4 words are known as short tail. A long or short tail keyword is a guided missile and, if discovered and used correctly, it can hit its target with extreme precision.

Looking for the answer

Many newbies who choose to create their own websites believe that keywords are just the words that a person could search for and if they populated a page with keywords, logic would suggest that your page would be returned in a search that contains that word. This misconception is soon realized when your page sadly drops to over 7k in Google results.

So first of all, before even using one of the many keyword search tools available, take some quality time to think about the visitors you want to drive to your page. Think about the questions you want answered.

Today’s search engine is a complex beast and its main goal is to provide your Customer (the user doing the search) with an answer that fits your question as perfectly as possible. So there is the first gold nugget, don’t just create keywords, create responses using those keywords.

This does not mean creating endless pages of questions and answers, but rather structuring your text so that it provides answers, incorporating those keywords, to a visitor in a search.

Keyword tools

There are many keyword search tools. Its validity will be directly related to the source of your word and to many who charge for the privilege. However, there are some reliable free tools, like Google and Bing’s keyword search engines, that will give you a very good starting point in your search for those primary text strings.

Equipped with your long and short tail keyword lists from the initial customer inquiry research you did, your next task is to see how often those keywords are being used. As you enter them into your chosen keyword tool, you will see results related to your keywords and word variants. Search for words that are found between 3 and 20,000 searches. This will indicate that they are used enough to provide enough opportunities for your website to appear on the search engine’s radar.

Create a list of about 20 keywords.

Page ranking

Your next task is to narrow down this list further by using the page rank tool. This tool can be added to your browser from the Google App Store and will show you the ranking of the particular page you are viewing via a small level indicator and associated number. Type one of your keywords in the search box and see the results returned. Ignoring the ads that are also returned, find the 10th page returned in the list and view it. Check your page rank. If it shows up as 4 or less, then with your own optimized page that string of keywords is likely to get you to the first page of results in front of the right customer.

And so we find another gold nugget. Our keyword strings, although they get less general results due to their specificity, do target Clients looking for that particular result. The closer you are to matching the customer, the better your click-through rate (CTR). It is a fact of life!

Keyword phrases need pages

So you have a tried and tested keyword list! But now what do you do with them? Well, imagine you go fishing with a rod to feed your hungry children. At most, you will catch a fish with your hook worm, if you are lucky. Now consider your hooked worm to be a keyword. That’s capturing a keyword result every now and then. So how do we feed that hungry family faster? We fish with a net and this is what you need to replicate with your web pages.

We build a fishing net using a generalized keyword and then on our pages we use our increasingly long keywords to build the net. confused? OK, try this:

Say, for example, you sell fluffy teddy bears. There must be people who love them; otherwise, you wouldn’t be selling them, right? (If you think that’s wrong, go back to your marketing course!).

Now consider the variations of teddy bears, there are quite a few, designer bears, fluffy bears, little bears, big bears, to name a few. The first step is to structure the types of bears on the pages into categories. Let’s go with ‘designer bears’. This would be our generalized keyword.

Below this we have subcategories of ‘large designer bears’ and below ‘large blue-eyed designer bears’ and below ‘large blue-eyed designer bears in brown’ and so on. Each length keyword has its own page. On each page, that particular keyword is optimized to appear between 2% and 4% of the total text on the page. Make sure the balance between keywords and general content makes sense to the customer and to the search engine; in fact, since the launch of the new algorithm, they are practically synonymous.

Spread the word

Other hotspots that should contain your keywords are your page titles (h1, h2, etc.). The meta tags that appear outside of your content, meta title, meta description and, to a lesser extent now, meta keywords. Any image you upload has the option of putting keywords in the ‘Alternative Text’ and if you can put them in the URL of the corresponding page.

The last word

There are many variables that determine your page’s overall ranking, but if you get everything else perfect in the absence of precise keyword usage, your page will fall on the deaf ears of customers! Remember the simple steps; Think like a customer, rank your keywords, and provide responses. With those stocks secured, you should see a favorable return on your efforts.