About Keyword Selection "Phase 2- Refining Core Terms"

Now that you have brainstormed and discovered the basic keywords that you will be using, it is time to refine that list into a list of keywords that people are actually searching for and them map them to your pages. During the brainstorming process we didn't think about what people actually search for, now we will discover these magic words as they relate to your site. This phase of the process will require the use of a few online tools, don't worry, we are gonna stick to the free ones.

The Overture Keyword Tool is a great place to start for this step in the process, but Wordtracker is one of the best. You can also use the keyword selection tool at Google Adwords, just sign-up for adwords, and use the tool, you don't have to give them any money.

Keyword Clusters
Now, to use the keyword selection tool, just enter in your keyword one at a time and we are gonna look for the top 10 variations of that individual keyword. Examine the variations of our keyword and note whether or not they are relevant to your web site, if so write them down. These will be your keyword "clusters". You want about 10-15 clusters that you know for certain people are searching for.

Prioritizing Your Keywords
Let's talk about prioritizing these clusters, some of these keyword clusters that you have stumbled upon maybe niches that are impossible to crack without spending thousands of dollars on links. I would go to the big 3 search engines and just scope out the pagerank and amount of links the competition has. If #9 has a pagerank of 9 and 300,000 inbound links, maybe you should take another approach.

Modifiers and Localization
For each cluster, you need to come up with a list of modifiers like "free". Go back to your keyword tool of choice, and add a simple modifier to a keyword, and look at the top 10-20, you will see "free", "tips, "help, and so on. Write these down, we are going to add these modifiers to to our keyword clusters whenever possible.

Localization means adding your city and state, or region to the clusters so your neighbors will be able to find your services in their area.

The next phase we will cover will be "Mapping Keyword Clusters to Pages.

Author: Murry Daniels
Murry Daniels is the owner of Goatsmilktavern Studios, a web design and search engine optimization company located in New Orleans, LA.