Keyword Research

In Search Engine Optimization, SEO, or in any project that you are working on, one of the first basic needs is to communicate about the project with the people involved. In many cases people speak in jargon especially if its a technical subject, but you will need to understand it and in the case of website development, you will need to understand how your visitors think and talk about your product,brand or service. It imparative that you know your subject and its participants well. One of the first actions which I undertake on a project is to start with some form of keyword research.

There are many tools and resources on the web to help with keyword research, but the most important first step is to understand your own knowledge about a subject. I use mindmaps to figure out what I may know or think about a subject, – its a way of consolidating a lot of knowledge on one page, utilizing the way that the brain thinks and processes information in a graphical format. Its a very effective method of information understanding, and I urge you to read up on mindmapping here.

Once I have a better understanding on the knowledge I have already acquired about a subject, I sit down and make a list of all the keywords that people around me are using to talk about their product, brand or service. If its a large project for a big organization, I like to immerse myself in its culture. Go and visit the company, sit in reception, listen to the daily calls back and forth, the water fountain chatter, list down any new word which is being used, or perhaps you could simply ask them to make a list of the keywords that they use in their business in their every day conversations. This is valuable research, learning the language of the culture you are designing for.

Once you have your basic list started, its time to start to implement some of the tools available to increase the keywords on your list. Click here to get to a list of tools and resources. Just remember that very often these tools don’t return usable data and if you are designing or optmizing a niche market the keywords returned and the usage volume may not be very accurate at all. You need to adjust your research accordingly with all the different tools, common sense can go a long way here, to determining a successful outcome.

If you really want to move into a more accurate assessment on the volume of keywords, you could advertise for these keywords in Google AdWords but not everybody will have the budget or need to go that route. In all honesty you can probably take all the keyword online information that the various search tools returned, with a grain of salt and be better off with the original organic keyword list that you started with. But it is important to utilize these tools as they constantly evolve, – check out all the latest options here.

Real words used by real people have real impact, they are the very best data to use for any project. When you do your keyword research keep track of the relationships which occurs between the different keywords. Group them together, using ‘main’ keywords and ‘sub’ keywords to maintain the relationships between each set and subset and also between different groups. If you come across groups of keywords or descriptive words which surround certain keywords its important to note them down as you will using them later to do saturated copy in something which is often referred to as keyword clustering.

Keyword Context

The Keyword rules, it is the power behind the throne and while your content is king then context is the queen. You cannot hope to push your SOE search optimization engine ranking if you are not using specialized keywords in your content and using it in the correct context.

I could write a thousand articles about Keyword ranking in Search Engine Optimization or SEO and although they might be on topic they wouldn’t help my SEO ranking. Most people don’t seem to realize that when they are asking me to help them get their sites to rank for a certain keyword; sites don’t rank in search engines – pages do! So if you want to rank a certain keyword you will need to decide which page is going to be the page that pushes the ranking for that keyword.

Search engine optimization had lots of clever little tricks which we employ as we back engineer search engines criteria for ranking and returning search results. However loading the title of every page and post today with keywords isn’t going to improve your search engine ranking, no matter how clever you word it. Neither will writing 100s of articles with your chosen keyword in, going to help you. Unless you put your articles and posts in context.

So how do you build context? You need pivotal content, to build context and to anchor your posts. A keystone or cornerstone is the foundation point of a building and is its anchor point and just like a building is constructed around a keystone so is a website’s page ranking constructed around pivotal, keystone, flagship key content which adheres to search engine optimization SEO principles and requirements. The key is creating compelling content that’s worth linking to, and then finding a way to get the word out.