Design Tips

Keyword research is some of the most profitable time you can spend on your website. Why do so few website Designers consider it at all?

Website Designers are pretty much two-a-penny on the Internet today, but what do we actually mean when we talk about website Design. These days, with the emergence of the search engines as such a powerful marketing resource, we cannot be talking about graphics, pictures, colours or look and feel. Of course these elements have their place, but if you are serious about a successful website they play second fiddle to the requirements of search engine optimisation.

Your first step in planning a website is to consider the objectives you have for your website, and I discuss this in detail in my article: SEO Website Design: The first step to success. After you have established your objectives you need to consider your keywords, that is, where are you going to compete for business in the search engines.

Your mission here is to predict what keywords a potential client of yours would type into a search engine when they were looking for you. For example, if you are a holiday tour operator, your client's may be typing in 'summer sun', or 'cheap weekend breaks.'

Incidentally, have you noticed that when you contact a company over the Internet they have started to ask you what keywords you used to find them? There are no prizes for guessing why they ask.

As another source of keywords you may consider your product or service names. You should also include variations on these keywords. For example, 'ski holiday', could also be 'skiing holiday' or 'ski holidays.' There are a number of freely available and subscription based keyword suggestion tools that you can use to get all the common variations.

The keyword suggestion tools will also give you an indication of activity on that keyword. That is, an indication of the number of times that keyword is entered into a particular search engine. These numbers should not be taken as literal, but used to compare comparative the effectiveness of keywords. Use the suggestion tools to weed out the lesser keywords and re-order your list with the most effective at the top. At this stage you should bear in mind that for every keyword you choose you will have to build good quality content around it, so don't pick too many.

There are some guidelines you should bear in mind when picking keywords:

Only choose keywords that relate to your business. That is, don't pick a work that is unrelated just because you think it will generate traffic. All you are doing is wasting time and resources.

You need keywords that have sufficient activity, but don't only pick generic keywords where there is massive competition. Add to that keyword to make it more specific to you, so you have a chance of competing.

If you put more thought into your keywords at this stage, you can save yourself hard work in developing parts of your website that have little or no chance of getting ranked in the search engines, or ranked highly for keywords that no one uses.

Your next step is to build a silo of rich relevant content around your keyword landing page, but that's the subject of another of my articles.

http://www.argo-sales-lead-generation.co.uk

// posted by gng @ 3:30 PM 0 comments