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Choosing Right Keywords is not a Guessing Game

iCraft Admin


Posts: 394


« on: November 18, 2009, 03:09:02 am »

If you just sit and guess which keywords or key phrases you should choose to optimize your page for, most likely you’ll get it wrong.

The way you should choose keywords is through Keyword Rereplacement and Keyword Analyses. Often you’ll find that some of the initial terms that you’ve chosen, are not replacemented very often or that they are too competitive.

There is no way I can cover all the details of choosing proper keywords or performing proper keyword analyses in one post. I’ll try to summarize main points and break it down into simpler terms. I’ll keep adding more tips on various topics over time. Unfortunately, SEO is not something you can learn over lunch break.

1. Create your own list of All Relevant Keywords
Actually, I’d suggest choosing a couple of products for now. This way you can learn the process and then apply it to the rest of your products. Otherwise, it might become too overwhelming.

Anyway, usually you start with a long list of keywords that you will eventually narrow down dramatically to “Preferred Terms” list.
Eventually, you’ll choose One Keyword (per product page) out of that list for which you’ll optimize your page for.

Start by creating a spreadsheet of All Relevant keywords that you can think of for each product (separate sheet for each). Start with obvious words that jump at you when you look at your product.

You need to choose keywords that most of your customers will be using when replacementing for your product on Google or other replacement engines. So you need to think like them or you can ask your customers what words they used when they replacemented for a particular product.

Also, ask others (family and friends, fellow Bootcampers) to describe your product and come up with a few possible keywords.
Actually, this could be a good exercise for Bootcampers to identify potential keywords for each other’s products.
Write down those terms.  

Check Google Analytics to see which keywords bring you the most traffic. Write down those as well.
Think of misspellings too. Some spelling mistakes are very important, with up to 20% of all replacementes containing a misspelled word.
Add all variations of singulars and plurals, hyphenated, as well as split and merged words.
Oct 26, 2010 Correction - in the last year or so replacement engines made optimizing content for misspellings irrelevant.

2. Use Keyword Tools to validate your terms
After you’ve put together a decent list of your “Best” keywords, you can switch to Keyword Tools to compare and validate your terms.
There are a few free, as well as some paid tools available to you. Both Yahoo http://replacementmarketing.yahoo.com and Google https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal provide free keyword analyses tools. To make things easier I’d choose one of them for now, probably Google AdWords keyword tool, as it doesn’t require you to open a PPC account like Yahoo does.

3. Choosing Preferred Terms
At a minimum, you need to evaluate each keyword for these parameters:
- Search Popularity
- Relevance
- Competition Level

It can be a time consuming exercise, especially if you have a very long list of keywords to analyse, but the next step is to start pulling replacement popularity and competition values from Keyword Tool into your spreadsheet so you can easily scan all values for all keywords at the same time. In the Relevance column you are going to put your own rating like “Poor” or “High”. Relevance rating is your judgement call. There is no special tool to get those values from.

Remember: The most useful keywords will strike a balance between popularity, relevance and competition.
Highlight those keywords in your spreadsheet. Cleanup your list by removing badly scored terms.

4. Combining Keywords
So now look at the highlighted keywords and see which keywords could be combined.
Tip: one-word terms are rarely relevant. Instead, think in which context they will be used. They are also highly competitive and hard to rank for.

So if you have terms on your list like “Earrings” with, let’s say, 2000 replacementes a day and “Silver Earrings” with 250 replacementes a day - choose “Silver Earrings”, as you will be actually optimizing for both terms “Earrings” and “Silver Earrings” at the same time with combined 2250 replacementes a day.

5. Page Optimization
The exercise you did above for choosing appropriate keywords was not for nothing.
Not only you now know which keywords best describe your product. You can also start optimising your pages for the chosen Keywords (both Primary and Secondary).

Though, that will be covered in another post. Cheers!   Wink
« Last Edit: October 26, 2010, 10:57:15 pm by iCraft Admin »
PinKixx


Posts: 33


« Reply #1 on: November 20, 2009, 08:48:36 am »

I'll definitely go ahead and do the #4. Thanks for the important info and your help!
iCraft Admin


Administrator
Posts: 1699


« Reply #2 on: March 31, 2010, 02:35:19 am »

If you are serious about SEO, here is a spreadsheet, that you can use for Keyword Analyses on your pages.
https://icraftgifts.com/assignments/Keyword_Analyses.xls
This was done for https://icraftgifts.com/fairy-cardmaker Exhibit, but it can be used as a template for any page.
We used Google Keywod Tool to gather the data. Initially, you end up with a long list of Keywords, that you’ll need to filter and shorten to just a few main Keywords or Key Phrases. Then you can use those Key Phrases to optimize the copy on your page.
Feel free to ask any questions. Thanks!
« Last Edit: April 01, 2010, 12:16:29 pm by iCraft Admin »
Fairy Cardmaker


Posts: 1115


« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2010, 08:12:33 pm »

 Embarrassed

Hmmmm I don't have excel or word since my harddrive crashed.  I'm holding out for MS office 2010 which is still in beta.
iCraft Admin


Administrator
Posts: 1699


« Reply #4 on: April 01, 2010, 12:20:50 pm »

Hi Ensorcelled Minds,
I can email this file in pdf for you, bit to work with it, you need to have a spreadsheet. I suggest you use Google Docs until you purchase Office 2010. http://docs.google.com
Fairy Cardmaker


Posts: 1115


« Reply #5 on: April 01, 2010, 07:30:48 pm »

Yes, I have google docs!
Forgot I could save this and open it there!
Thanks!
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