Defining appropriate keywords for your SEO campaign is critical

First activity is a critical one: decide on the keywords that should be targeted for the website and for individual pages. This does not have to be done for all pages - just the key pages. The key pages are those that you wish prospects to link to directly from search results. These may be product pages, service pages, the home page etc. Define around 20 keywords for the site.

Keywords are not submitted to search engines, instead the search engines perform their own analysis (called spidering) which amongst other things will assess the words appearing on each page and form a conclusion of what the keywords are for the page/site. SEO is partially about structuring the site and content so that search engines come to the desired conclusion.

Marketing Keywords

Here is some guidance on choosing marketing-related keywords:

• Keywords will be pervasive in your site so must be chosen to carefully reflect your business/product/service.
• Use phrases rather than words - they are more specific.
• Check which keywords competitors are targeting.
• Be specific were possible e.g. a tree specialist would use arborist rather than gardener.
• Be aware of how your prospective customer might search for you site. Would they search by a model number or a description or a specification? What vocabulary do they use to describe what they want?
• In the case of an online shop, keywords may be created for product categories and sub categories.
• Check existing web server logs to see what people have searched on to get to your site.
• Key pages should be chosen to minimise the user action to achieve the required outcome e.g. if the outcome is a product sale then focus on the product page rather than the home page as that would require extra user-action to get to the desired product.

Technical Keyword Analysis

One of the primary roles of an SEO specialist is to help identifying keywords. For example they will identify variations on your chosen keywords that are often searched for but where the sites at the top of the results list are low quality. SEO specialists use software packages to assist them in efficiently identifying good keywords but still, much of the work hinges on the skill and experience of the specialist.

A good SEO specialist will assess the popularity of your keywords and suggest variations that will give your website a higher chance of appearing on that all-important first search results page.

Technical keyword analysis is not the subject of this paper as here, we are documenting what non-technical users can achieve.