Choose your keywords wisely

There is lots of advice on this blog for how to get ranked well for whichever keyword you decide to choose. But how do you decide what keywords to optimise for? Moreover, what combination of words do you use, in what order and with which spellings?

Here are some dos and don’ts for choosing which keywords to choose:

Do make sure people are searching for the keywords. Getting to the top of the SERPs for a phrase is great and everything, but it’s hardly much use if nobody out there is searching for the term. There are a number of tools out there to help you choose the search terms that are used by people. Google’s Keyword Tool is my own personal favorite.

Do look at the competition. This goes for pretty much all areas of marketing. See what your competitors are ranking for, optimising for and not doing so well for. Can you use the terms they are not so good at optimising for?

Don’t target very broad keywords. Although getting results for broad keywords are a great thing, targeting a keyword like “computers” is going to be a big waste of money. Companies that rank for such keywords are huge sites with hundreds of thousands of links. So unless you have a huge SEO budget and a well established domain, pick a less broad keyword like “cheap computers”, “value computers” or “cheap laptop computers”.

Do fine tune your keywords. It is a really good idea to check back often and see what keywords are working well and which aren’t. You can then remove the keywords that are not getting you any traffic (or sales) and replace them with others that might do better. You can also check to see if there are any keywords that you can optimise for on a more seasonal basis. There are a lot of businesses that can benefit from re-thinking their keywords for the Christmas season for example.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer