Anyone who’s had anything to do with creating a website will know that if you want your site to rank well in the search engines, you need to optimize your site’s pages with the right keywords. But, what are the right keywords?
Let’s say you’ve got a site on “acne”. Now, you might think that ranking for the term “acne” would be great, and you’d be right. It would be fantastic to rank for a highly searched term like acne! However, that’s actually not a smart keyword to go for, especially if your site’s brand new.
Why not? Because it’s going to be literally impossible for you to rank even in the top 10 (at least for a long, long, frustrating time). What you really want to do, is rank for a keyword or keyword phrase that is far less competitive, but still gets a good number of searches. In the case of a website about acne, something like “cystic acne treatment” would be a far better choice.
You see, the idea is to get a high ranking for keywords that get a good number of searches, but which are still uncompetitive enough that it’s not going to take you years of time and effort to reach that elusive #1 position on Google. In fact, if you play your cards right, you could end up ranking #1 within just a few months.
Now, it’s a bit different if you’re a local business owner. You probably don’t have a zillion different keywords to choose from. Depending on where you live, there may only be one or two keywords that get enough searches to give the site in the #1 position reasonable traffic. This is good news, as it generally means the competition is much easier.
However, you still have to know exactly what keywords and keyword phrases are being searched for, and you have to determine secondary keywords that relate to your business, but which don’t get enough searches to be worthwhile to rank for on their own. A good place to do some research is with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Let’s say you’re a builder from New York. You go to the keyword tool, type in: builder New York, and then click “Search”. The tool will produce a list of keywords all related to the one you’ve put in, and will show you exactly how many times each of these keywords is searched for a month.
From this list, you’d determine which keywords were searched for most often, and you’d also get a reasonable idea of the competitiveness of the terms. Obviously, if you’re from a city like New York, you may want to narrow it down to your local suburb when you’re just starting out, as the competition will be easier to beat, but if you’re from a smaller city then going with the city name will probably be fine.
Now you’ve got a selection of great keywords, you need to start building pages that use each of the major keywords. Now obviously if you’re an accountant from Orlando, you’ll probably want your site to rank for “accountant Orlando” or whatever the most popular search term is, but if that’s a particularly competitive term your goal will be to build up to it by ranking your site for less competitive terms that still relate to your business. However, the overall theme of your site will reflect the main keyword you’re targeting because your ultimate goal is #1 in Google for that search term.
So, the main goal with selecting keywords for your site is to approach it systematically rather than haphazardly. Don’t create a website without knowing exactly what terms you’re targeting, or you’ll end up wasting time and energy on a site that’s likely to languish several pages down in the search engine results. Once you know exactly what you want to rank for, and you’ve got an idea of the competition, you can start building your site while focusing on those particular keywords and phrases.
There’s obviously a lot more to ranking #1 in the search engines than simply being smart with your keywords, but it’s still a very important starting point, and one that will set your site in good stead for future ranking success.
