By Lorelle Smith
Selecting the right keywords to emphasize on your site is crucial to your online success.
The terms you optimize for must match the terms your prospective customers use in their queries, otherwise the search engines won’t realize your site is just what they’re looking for. If you’re the site owner or its webmaster, your perspective will be narrower than your prospective customers’ and you probably won’t use the identical terms that they do. That’s why it’s important to look outside as well as inside your organization to find the best keywords to use.
Mistake #1: Not researching how actual people phrase their searches for a particular product or service.
Don’t guess, KNOW which terms are more popular: Plural or singular versions? Two words or one word (i.e. website or web site)? With or without suffixes (-ing, -tion, -ant, etc.)? A little bit of research will also yield common misspellings and synonyms you may have overlooked.
How to research? There are 4 main methods:
- Use an online tool.
- Ask your customers.
- Ask your sales team.
- Look at your server “referer” logs.
Mistake #2: Choosing broad and overly generic keyword phrases.
Say you sell shoes for various sports. Don’t optimize for the single keyword “shoes,” of course — that’s way too broad. Even “athletic shoes” is too broad. Instead, look for words that reveal the searcher’s intent to purchase, such as “buy athletic shoes” or “athletic shoe store,” or intent to narrow down their choices, such as “best shoes for athletes.”
Mistake #3: Optimizing for only one phrase per page.
You don’t want to dilute the focus of a page by mentioning too many diverse keywords; don’t go to the other end of the spectrum and select just one phrase. Ideally, you should pick 3 or 4 phrases that are fairly similar to each other. That will make it easier to get some variety in your copy. Which leads to the next error so many people make…
Mistake #4: Repeating the chosen keywords ad nauseum.
You can always tell when keyword-rich copy was written by someone who knows just enough about keywords to be dangerous: It will sound funny. It takes finesse to work in the keywords without going overboard. Think about how you normally write sales copy: “Looking to buy athletic shoes? We have the best shoes for athletes of all ages. So no matter what type of active footwear you’re currently in the market for, XYZ Shoes wants to be your family’s athletic shoe store.” Someone trying to write keyword-rich copy might make the mistake of writing, “Looking to buy athletic shoes? We have the best athletic shoes for athletes of all ages. So no matter what type of athletic shoes you’re looking for, XYZ Athletic Shoes wants to be your family’s athletic shoe store.”
Such a person might think they’re doing it right by including both plural and singular versions, and even altering their brand name to get the keyword in, but if they read it out loud they’d immediately realize how contrived it sounds.
The English language doesn’t work like that. If we want to repeat a word we just used, either in the last sentence or a phrase in the same sentence, we use a “shortcut” word. For instance, you wouldn’t say “I went to John’s house. John wasn’t home so I left a note on John’s front door.” You’d use “he” and “his” for the second and third iterations.
Don’t be afraid to use these types of natural shortcuts in your copy; you really don’t need to repeat your keyphrases that often anyway. Several times on a page plus prominent placement in the title tag and meta tags is enough for the search engines to understand that this is what the page is about. Going overboard will turn off your customers and might even raise red flags for the engines.
Mistake #5: Not using the exact phrase cohesively.
Here is where using a natural shortcut with the English language gets in the way. The search engines can’t see it as an exact match for the query if there are intervening words. For example, “baseball and basketball shoes” means “baseball shoes and basketball shoes” — two totally different types of shoes — but the search engines won’t get that so don’t hope to show up at all for “baseball shoes.” (Yet another reason to give each type of product its own page.)
Mistake #6: Repeating the same keywords on every single page.
Search engines see each page of a site as a standalone site, so each page should have its own keywords. Also, don’t make the mistake of putting on the home page ALL the keywords you’ve chosen for the entire site. (However, the home page often serves as a hub to all the inner pages. For instance, if your site sells athletic shoes, the text on the home page will probably want to mention the various types of shoes. That’s fine — just link each mention to the page selling that type of shoe.)
Mistake #7: Stressing out over keyword meta tags.
Don’t put a lot of thought into creating these tags, because they are nearly worthless. Also, don’t make the mistake of putting just your chosen keywords into the tag. Why help your competitors? What I do to throw them off is list all the main words on the page, which will naturally include my chosen keywords. I also add misspellings that I wouldn’t want to incorporate into the visible copy of any page. You could certainly use the keyword tag
just for misspellings — in fact, I think that’s the most appropriate use for it, except that Google completely ignores the tag. PS: No, it does not matter if you separate words with spaces or commas. The engines usually ignore punctuation.
Mistake #8: Going after the most competitive keywords in your industry.
Your research will tell you just how competitive a phrase is so you can instead go after the low-hanging fruit your competition has overlooked. One way to judge the competition for each keyphrase is to type this query in
Google:
allintitle: “your phrase here”
This exact syntax will flush out only those sites that have the exact phrase in their title tag. Since many web developers/designers don’t know how important the title tag is, they often leave it blank or leave a default value of “New Page 1“or “http://(url).” So you can pretty much count on a keyword-rich title tag as being the most basic sign of an SEO’d site, and that’s your competition. Look for slightly longer keyword phrases (3-5
words) to use; however, it’s estimated that 25% of all queries are never repeated, and many of them are 5 words or more.
CONCLUSION
There are several online tools to help with keyword research, and some of them even give you the exact number of times a keyphrase was queried over x number of days. I’ll be reviewing these tools for you next time.
To sum up:
If you do your homework and choose keyword phrases that reveal intent but aren’t hypercompetitive, and use them intelligently in your copy, title tag, and meta tags, the search engine gods might actually deign to index your site. There are lots of other factors, to be sure, but this is a very good start!
Lorelle Smith,
The Keywordsmith