Website Keywords – Do They Pass the Test?

Last time we talked about four rules for choosing great website keywords for search engines. Let’s think about why these are important and what might happen if you don’t follow them.

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?

Tags: keywords, long tail, niche, search engine, SEO, website

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