Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Selecting Keywords

Com­pleted So Far:

With every­thing up and run­ning, I have begun prepar­ing a list of pow­er­ful key­words that I can use to build my blog’s con­tent around.

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New Devel­op­ments:

Key­words and Keyphrases are the words and phrases that peo­ple use to search with when they do an online, i.e. Google or Yahoo! search. The more peo­ple who search using the same key­words you have used in your blog, the more likely it is that you will have vis­i­tors to your site.

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Note:

When using keyphrases, you should limit the num­ber of words used to between 2 and 5 words. Using more than 5 words reduces the effec­tive­ness of your keyphrase.

For the rest of this series, I will be using the word ‘key­word’ to mean both key­words and keyphrases.

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Select­ing pow­er­ful key­words or keyphrases is not always an easy task but, in the long run, is worth the effort.

Once you have iden­ti­fied the types of pages you will be adding to your blog, and have some idea of the con­tent for each page, it’s time to make a ‘seed list’ of poten­tial key­words that you will build into the content.

Some tips for select­ing pow­er­ful key­words include:

Brain­storm­ing: Brain­storm pos­si­ble words and phrases that describe your prod­uct or ser­vice either by get­ting ideas from other peo­ple, or mind-mapping, etc .

Find­ing pow­er­ful key­words requires a bit of research.

1. Using Non-specific key­words, that iden­tify gen­eral cat­e­gories, e.g. dig­i­tal cam­eras or cars;
2. Using prod­uct spe­cific key­words, that iden­tify spe­cific prod­ucts, e.g. Nikon D80 or 2005 Honda Accord;
3. Using loca­tion spe­cific key­words, that iden­tify a spe­cific city or region, e.g. Toronto Nikon Dealer, Guelph Honda;
4. Using word vari­a­tions, e.g instead of car use truck, van, SUV, or auto, auto­mo­bile, vehicle
5. Check out your competitor’s web­sites, what words or phrases are fre­quently repeated.

You can usu­ally gen­er­ate a fairly exten­sive list of poten­tial key­words just by brain­storm­ing, or you can also dust off the old the­saurus, see what word vari­a­tions you can use to expand your list with. At this point, you can either begin inte­grat­ing words from this list into your copy, or  you can go one step fur­ther and use a key­word analy­sis program.

Key­word Analy­sis Pro­grams: A key­word analy­sis pro­gram deter­mines which key­words peo­ple are already using to search for your prod­ucts or ser­vices, and which of these key­words are being used most often. Some key­word analy­sis pro­grams will even pro­vide you with alter­na­tive key­words that can be used instead of your orig­i­nal key­word. Most search engines have some kind of key­word analy­sis tool that you can access.

At Google there are three tools that you can play with:

1. Google Search-Based Key­word Tool: http://www.google.com/sktool/
2. Google Adwords Key­word Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
3. Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends

Another great key­word analy­sis tool is SEO Blog­ger by Word­tracker. Word­tracker is a com­pany that spe­cial­izes in key­word track­ing, analy­sis, etc, and offers sev­eral ‘tools’ that you can use to do key­word analy­sis with, some free, some not so free. Free down­load­able tools include a Word­tracker tool­bar that works with both Microsoft’s IE browser and the SEO Blog­ger that works on Fire­fox. Basi­cally the SEO Blog­ger plu­gin sits as an icon at the bot­tom of the Fire­fox browser page. When you click on the icon, a col­umn appears on the left hand side of your browser win­dow. Just type-in a key­word and the pro­gram gen­er­ates a list of alter­na­tive key­words plus an indi­ca­tion of how pop­u­lar both your key­word and the alter­na­tive key­words are. This plu­gin is very easy to install and use.  You can down­load a copy of SEO Blog­ger at http://labs.wordtracker.com/seo-blogger/

Word­tracker pub­lishes a free online tool, Key­word Ques­tions, found at http://labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions that is also fun to play with. You type in a key­word and Key­word Ques­tions pro­vides a list of ques­tions that have been used over the past year to research the mar­ket your key­word rep­re­sents. You can eas­ily pull new key­words from the ques­tions listed here.

There are other key­word analy­sis tools avail­able, like Key­word­Dis­cov­ery at: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com and Click­Tracks at: http://www.clicktracks.com but both of these are subscription-based ser­vices and cost to use.

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Next Step:

Now that you have gen­er­ated a dynamic list of pow­er­ful key­words, it’s time to start using the key­words and keyphrases. Monday’s post will look at how to effec­tively inte­grate key­words into your blog.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Opti­miz­ing Your Blog from the begin­ning by going to the Intro­duc­tion post.

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