Search Optimization SEO

Keyword Analysis

Understanding which keywords you should be targeting is fundamental to good SEO.

 

It is often the case that there is a typical keyword or set of keywords your target audience will use when looking for the sort of site you offer. In many cases, these keywords are not what you may intuitively expect them to be. As such it is important to use keyword analysis tools to determine exactly what your target keywords should be. When performing a keyword analysis, you should be looking to get a picture of a number of factors: primarily the search volume of the keywords and the level of competition of given keywords, including both how competitive it will be to a achieve a page 1 presence as well as the typical advertiser competition for advertisement space on such a keyword.   Finally, you are looking for general keyword suggestions that you may not have thought of. These suggestions may be in terms of identifying an unexpected primary keyword, or alternatively finding low competition suggestions that may be reasonable to target on an inner page that may contain for example an article.

 

 

When starting out in SEO there are a number of useful free keyword analysis tools. These include the free keyword analysis tool from Google, Google trends, the overture keyword tool which gives keyword suggestions and search volume based on data from yahoo or another useful keyword volume and suggestion tool by KeywordDiscovery.

 

 

All these tools give some level of understanding of search volume, however, none of these free tools will give exact search volumes from Google, and generally the values should be considered a relative indication of volume rather than an exact measure. Obviously, for different targeted keywords, it is good to find keywords to target with the highest volume at the lowest level of competition. Additionally, some of the tools, such as overture, will sometimes contain an unlikely entry or give conflicting information to the other tools, and as such, they are not always accurate. It is therefore useful as you start to narrow your selection of primary keywords to check these keywords in all the tools to give a better overall indication.

 

 

There are a number of ways to measure SEO competition for a given keyword. These include looking at the number of competing entries in Google as well as analysing the strength of the entries on the front page of Google for your search term. In terms of the number of competing sites, this figure can be seen in the top right of a Google search where is says “Results 1 - 10 of about 5,000,000 for Keyword”. Here the number 5,000,000 is an indication of the competition. When looking at this metric, I prefer to look at the competition when searching for you keyword in quotes, as this gives the number of pages that are more optimised for the keyword and I have also found this to be a more accurate metric.

 

 

In accessing the competition for a given keyword, it is also useful to analyse the top ten entries in Google for that keyword. When analysing the strength of the entries on the front page of Google for you keyword search there are a number of things you should look at. This includes the page rank of the top 10 entries, whether these entries have used the keyword in the title as displayed in the search results, the number of backlinks reported for the pages in yahoo and even the date of registration of the domain name. It is very easy to identify this information quickly with an extension for the Firefox web browser known as SEO Quake. This extension will add all these values to your Google search for each result in the listing, thus enabling you to quickly get a feel for the level of competition involved in reaching a page one presence.

 

 

It is fundamental to gain some experience exploring keyword analysis techniques and to perform a thorough analysis at a very early stage of a sites development. Without identifying the correct terms to target, you will never fully exploit the traffic you could from the search engines, and by knowing these terms at a very early stage, you will be able to properly optimise your site from the beginning and know which anchor texts you should be using in a link building campaign.