Note about keyword research: Frequency and Distribution

When choosing keywords one must keep in mind the frequency that the targeted term is searched for. You shouldn't optimized your site for a keyword or term that gets only 10 or so searches a month. When using the different keyword tracker tools, look for a high traffic keyword or key term to be the primary focus of your optimization. Leave the words or phrases that get around 100 searches a month to be your secondary keyword for that page. The object of keyword research is to find out what people are searching for when they look for products and services like yours, you can't force people to search for anything.

If you have a new product that no one has ever heard of, it is best not to use the product name as your primary keyword until the brand is established. If this is the case, use terms related to the product, or function of the product.

Remember to use individual landing pages with only a few keywords related to each individual page, don't try to work all your keywords into one page. Optimizing a site is exactly that, optimizing the entire site. You are not just trying to get traffic to your home page.

When building links, route different links to the pages they are most related to. If you business is web design and SEO, you should have one or more pages about web design a a few about SEO. Links from web design firms should go to the web design pages, and links from SEO companies should go to your SEO related pages.

Some niches are harder to break into, so do some background research on the sites that are scoring high for your target terms. Find out how many links they have to that page, the age of the domain, and the keyword density. It is not impossible to break into a niche with established sites, but it will take more onsite and offsite SEO to do it, but don't be scared.

Food for Thought.

I came across a post at Dave Naylor's website that got me thinking. It seems the W3C website is not using nofollow tags on their "registered members" page, so is this considered a paid link?

W3C is transferring a lot of link juice to the companies that "register" with them, including Google. According to their new "law", will they penalize these "members" for a paid link?

Read more HERE.

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.

Goatsmilktavern SERP results

Check this out! I just checked my rankings in the Google. SERPs, I am doing pretty good. I haven't really done that much offsite SEO to the Goatsmilktavern Website.

I had intentions of really slamming the search engines when I was done writing all of the content for the site, but I am creeping up without any links. I really thought it would be harder than this considering I am competing with other, larger SEO companies. When I start my link campaign I should be on top of every key phrase I am targeting. It appears that "New Orleans web design" will be the hardest nice to bust into simply because of the age of the other sites (mine is only a year old). I would like to concentrate on SEO, but I still love being a web designer.

I made a post on my other blog that is more fitting for this one about how to get indexed in Google in 24 hours. you can find it here. The company I work for is now selling websites and I had to get one indexed fast, and it only took me 1 blog post and about 4 hours of waiting to do it.

I am working on a series of tips to move your site up the search engines, so look for them here soon.