Effective keyword research

Getting your site indexed and ranked requires many different elements in your site’s overall SEO strategy, but the most important part of your strategy is researching and using the right keywords. Fine tuning your sites keywords should never use a hit and miss approach, using the wrong keywords can actually hurt your sites ranking and keep it out of top contention on the major SERPs.

In the SEO optimization of your site you have concentrated on making your content useful and easy to navigate for human visitors, with the addition of the most popular keywords and phrases in our Meta content we will make those pages easy to find on the SERPs.

Your keyword research should be focused on identifying the most common search queries for your website’s targeted audience. While there are many useful tools available for your keyword research, there are 2 websites you should make your primary research around: WordTracker, and Overture.

There are some quality professional tools available for conducting keyword research that have the ability to create multiple keyword research projects and export your search results to a spreadsheet that can be saved locally on your PC along with other tools for promotion and tracking. The price varies for these types of tools and programs with the higher priced programs offering additional tools for website promotion.

To begin your keyword research you should start with broad terms and work down to more refined keywords.

Example: Real Estate… Real Estate sales… California Real Estate sales…Los Angeles Real Estate sales.

Knowing what consumer’s are looking for in a product or service is just as important as the specific keywords commonly used, because knowing how a consumer thinks will give you additional insights that can be used to identify keyword phrase variations such as; regional information, misspellings, and slangs. These variations on your common keywords and phrases could potentially offer additional keyword Meta content on your pages.

To maximize your keywords research results, test your search queries at Google and the other major search engines, you will be surprised to find out that the same keywords queries will return slightly different results because each of the major search engines place a different weighted values on certain word combinations, and this why your SEO optimization campaign will include the building of some pages optimized for each of the major search engines.

Another helpful trick in researching keywords is to look for common misspellings. There are many websites that have free web based typo search tools that will help you locate the most common words that are misspelled. Once you have indentified these words you should create pages using this misspellings in your Meta tags.

One of the most common research practices is to see what keywords and phrases your top competitors are using. Look for variation, and keywords and phrases you are not using and before you include them in your list of keywords research them via WordTracker and Overture.

Another powerful research tool is your own sites tracking logs. They will show you the exact keyword query used and the search engine that returned the results. When you spot typos make note of then and add them to your research.