To recap, a great keyword must be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

Have you heard? General keywords are out and ultra-focused long-tail combinations are in. I’m thinking here about the difference between ‘Gordon Ramsay’ and ‘Gordon Ramsay hamburger recipe’. Focused keywords help you to zero in on your niche and to write content that searchers are really looking for.

If you go for general terms, you’ll find it hard to compete and get your website seen on search engines. You’ll also risk writing content that’s too general for your visitors.

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

Keyword relevance is vital and the closer to your subject area the better. Going back to Gordon for a second, there’s no point going for the hamburger keyword if your page is about the latest repeat of Kitchen Nightmares. Yes, they are related, but your average web visitor only gives you a nanosecond to show them exactly what they are looking for.

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

The first two points will be wasted if you don’t have a decent search volume of people looking for your chosen keyword. It’s easy to find long-tail keyword combinations, but you need to know there’s someone out there looking for them. You can use online tools such as Wordtracker or AdWords to check out search volumes for your keyword shortlist.

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

Once you have 1 to 3 nailed down, you’re probably well on the way, but you need to check how much competition you have. Long tail keywords mostly have lower competition than general terms (not always) but you need to verify this.

It’s OK to measure how many competing sites you have using a simple Google search, but that doesn’t tell you the whole picture. Google will return everything that seems relevant and that includes all the different combinations and extensions of your keyword. If you’re going to do this properly, you need to see whether the other sites have been optimized for search. What does this mean? I’m talking about titles, tags, text and links – standard SEO stuff.

So hopefully I’ve convinced you that these rules are important.

Do your keywords pass the test?

If you’re thinking of looking into long tail searches (eg vacation rentals) for your site, where do you go to find them? These are the odd combinations of keywords that Googlers look for such as “vacation rental with extra barbeque”. They give you insight into what people are looking for.

There are some great resources for this, such as the free version of Wordtracker or Google Suggest. Just type in your basic keyword (vacation rentals here) and you’ll get a list of combinations. The many long combinations at the end are the long tail.

The problem with this idea is that you get a public list. It’s also a list of general searches, rather than something specific to your site.

It’s better to look at your own website visitors. What combinations are they looking for? Your analytics tool such as Google Analytics will tell you what keywords brought people to your site. That’s the big difference

This information is incredibly valuable and you can use it to find out what makes your site unique. I’ll bet there are some combinations in there that you never expected!!

Have you heard of the long tail? It’s the wacky combinations of words that people search for, such as ‘vacation rental with easy walk to beach’, or ‘vacation rental with extra kitchen equipment’. Although not many people type in these terms individually, the combination of all of these different searches adds up to a lot of Google searches per day.

The key here is that these searches provide you with clues on what people are REALLY looking for and if you can act on these clues then you can find ways to make your vacation rental stand out from the crowd.

OK, so I’m not expecting you to relocate your property to the beach! There will be other clues that you can act on. Maybe people are looking for baby monitors, or quality bedding, or room to park their boat off the road. It’s amazing what you find out once you start looking.

So here’s a question: How do you find out what people are searching for?

A webiste is an artiste who works with the web. Its correct pronunciation is web-iste. It is often combined with other words like:

Webiste designer: an artiste who designs for the web

Free webiste: someone who does it for free

Family webiste: a webiste who is part of a family

Webiste development: what webistes do as they progress through their career

Do you believe any of this? I thought not. I invented the word purely to demonstrate that common words can often be spelled wrongly on the web. This happens a fair amount when people type queries into search engines such as Google. Why is this worth knowing?

Well, you can probably get a small-ish amount of visitors to your site by targeting a few common keyword mis-spellings. Webiste is just website with two swapped letters. There are a few searches performed each day on the mis-spelled version. Its only a few but this is a fairly common technique referred to as targeting the long tail of search engine enquiries.

Try targeting a few mis-spellings of you website keywords and see if you get any hits from the search engines. Let me know if it works!