Keywords

You might have heard the term SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. It’s one thing having a great website, but you also want people to find out about it, and one way of doing this is to optimise your site for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. These search engines periodically scan your website and if it looks like something their users might want to see, it’ll appear higher in their rankings. Of course, the higher up you appear, the more people will find your site and the more custom you’ll get!

There are an awful lot of things to take into consideration for SEO. The good news is, if I’ve made your site, you can check the box marked ‘search engine friendly coding’. Another type of optimisation that you yourself can bring to the table is a well thought out keyword strategy.

Care over your content

Chances are, you’ll be writing your own content. The most obvious thing to do is make it engaging and interesting for your reader. I’m sure you’ll scatter keywords throughout your text without even thinking about it- if you’re a plumber from Tynemouth, you’ve probably used ‘plumber’ and ‘Tynemouth’ once or twice on your homepage, which is ideal. You can go further than this though, and that’s where keyword research comes in!

Google’s Keyword Tool

A great place to go for your keyword research Google’s keyword tool, which has the added advantage of being free! There are others, but you generally have to pay a monthly premium. All you need is a Google account, which you’ll have if I’m making your website, as you’ll be using it to access your site analytics.

Log in and put your keywords/phrases in the box at the top, refine your search if needed using the ‘Advanced Options and Filters’, check the [Exact] box, so that it returns the exact phrase you’ve typed in the keywords box at the top (experiment with “Phrase” and Broad too, if you like (the ‘?’ tells you exactly what they mean).

Hit ‘Search’ and it’ll return statistics on the keyword you typed and suggest a bunch of keywords underneath. It’s up to you to decide whether to use a keyword or not and you base this on the results in the Local Monthly Searches and Competition columns.

If There are loads of searches but a lot of competition, it will be more difficult to get yourself on the first page of search results for those keywords unless you’ve done an awful lot of SEO work elsewhere (receiving good quality, genuine links into your site from other websites who like your content is a very effective example of SEO, but also very time consuming). It might, therefore, be worth omitting that keyword and including one that has less searches but also less competition, so that you’ll appear higher up in the rankings for that phrase.

It’s up to you

The strategy to use is up to you, but having a strategy is what counts- take plenty of time to give your keywords serious consideration.