Finding Key Words
Finding key words…..kind of important? You bet. It’s also the first step to optimizing a site and should start BEFORE you even know what your site is going to look like.
One of the most common requests (more so now than in the past these days) that new web design clients ask about in an initial consultation is the inclusion of a search engine strategy with their new or upgraded web site. The conversation generally turns to a competitor who comes up with high rankings for certain keyword phrases, etc. “How can we ‘be found’ like competitor XYZ for this search term or that search term?” It starts with finding key words, absolutely.
Well, without realizing it, when we search for anything on the web, we use key words in our search engine. Looking for piano lessons in Atlanta? You won’t just type ‘piano’ in Google will you? You’ll probably type something more specific to what/where you are looking for like ‘piano lessons atlanta’ or ‘piano lessons in atlanta’.
Your potential customer/client is going to do the SAME THING when looking for services your site offers, so finding key words to use on your site is kind of….ahem…..important.
Where do we start though? We know what we do and where we do it, right? Seems kind of easy….
However, a bit of ‘competitive analysis’ is actually a brilliant place to start with a new site SEO strategy. Start with competitor sites, or with sites that rank highly for the key words you might type if you were your own customers! We all do it look at competitor sites, with design, images, content….why would finding key words be any different? We find a site we like, maybe a competitor, maybe not, but we find SOMETHING to base our projects on and go from there.
Step ONE: With SEO, finding the ideal site is not difficult. I’ve said this before, but ‘think like your client would’. Type the ideal key-phrase you want to rank for into both Google and Yahoo (Google is enough for some) and review the top 2 pages returned. You really need to focus on sites for companies similar in size and purpose to yours if possible….trying to match amazon.com, ebay.com, or wikipedia.com for instance is a waste of time because they have SO much content and so many sites linking to them, etc. (all factors that will keep them at the top of many search phrases for good).
Step TWO: Choose 2-3 sites to ’study’ from an SEO perspective. Review the sites and look for patterns with regard to text links (how many key-phrases are found within their links), title tags (check out the source code and look at meta tags as well) for each page, heading tags (are they using key-phrase-rich H1, H2, etc throughout the site?), and navigation (do their main navigation links contain key-phrases?).
There are too many potential tactics to list here, but you get the idea.
Step THREE: Even if you snag a few ideas for promoting key word rich content throughout the pages of your site…it’s a great start to hand to your webmaster or web design partner. I will caution you….if a site is gaining high rankings using ‘black-hat techniques (trying to fool a browser with something other than great content meant for HUMAN consumption), stick with the great content. That’s what the engines are after, and they’ll never punish you or remove you from their index for having great content!