Imagine spending hours optimizing your site for a keyword, only to discover that no one searches for that keyword or that a slightly tweaked keyword gets 5 times the traffic. How would you feel? The solution, hit the bullseye the first time itself. Follow the simple steps given below and your website will be rearing to go.

STEP 1 : IDENTIFY THE OBVIOUS KEYWORDS

List out all the obvious keywords that you can think of into a text editor. Study the list for some time and add more terms that you might have missed out in the first place. Some keywords from the list might not be searched that often, but this is just the first step.

STEP 2 : CHECK YOUR COMPETITORS KEYWORDS

Check your competitor’s websites for the keywords that they have used. Or, if you are new to the field, check the links that rank in top 10 and see their keywords. How to do that? Go to their website, then goto “view” in the toolbar, and click on “Source code”.

Look for <META NAME = “keywords”>, these would be their keywords. Go through 5- 10 such sites and you will see some common terms used. Most of the times you will end up with more keywords than in your original list.

STEP 3 : CONSULT YOUR FRIENDS / COLLEAGUES

Ask your friends and collegues that if they were looking for a particular website, what terms would they use to look for in the search engine. Often you’ll get answers you would have never thought off. Add these to your list.

STEP 4 : PUT YOURSELF IN THE READER’S SHOES

Stop thinking that you know what terms the customer is searching for in the search. Put yourself in their shoes and think what term would you be looking for had you been searching for eg: flash tutorials. You will find that some terms you were so optimistic about are hardly ever searched for or have not been searched so often in the past month.

If you are going to put so much time and energy in collecting your keywords, do it right.

STEP 5 : CHECK THE POPULARITY OF YOUR KEYWORDS

Once you have your list ready, you can check how popular it is, ie how many people have searched for it in the past month / year. Google provides a free keyword analysis tool for this purpose. It is one of the most widely used keyword analysis tools ever. You can either enter all your keywords – one on each line, click on “get keyword ideas”; Google adwords will provide you with the local search volume for the previous month and for the year. Else, you can also select the second option website content and let Google adwords pull up keywords from your website, it will show the monthly & global volume for the same.

If you are looking for something more extensive, see Wordtracker, the most popular among SEO professionals. Wordtracker searches multiple search engines at once for you. Take there 7 days free trial before purchasing.

STEP 6 : FIND YOUR COMPETITION

For every term you search in the search engine, you can see the exact number of competitors providing service for the exact keywords. I have mentioned in my earlier posts, that when you search for a term, the seach engine displays the results based on various factors. To avoid links which are not relevant, always search your terms in quotations. ie, if you are searching for – flash tutorials, in your search engine search bar, type the keyword as “flash tutorials”. Thus, the only links that will be displayed in the results will be for the exact phrase – flash tutorials.

Then look at the bar below, on the right extreme is displayed a number; that is the number of competitors for the exact phrase – flash tutorials. You can see the same for various browsers. It is a tedious job looking up for the competition for different browsers, but it is worth it in the long run.You can also use the Wordtracker tool to make your job easier.

STEP 7 : KEI ANALYSIS

KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is the comparison of the number of people searching for a term and the number of web pages returned by a search engine for that particular term.In short, a ratio of popularity and competitiveness. Let P denote the popularity of the keyword and C the competitiveness, The formula for KEI = (P^2/C), i.e. KEI is the square of the popularity of the keyword and divided by its competitiveness.

• The KEI for a keyword should increase if its popularity increases.

• The KEI for a keyword should decrease if it becomes more competitive.

• If a keyword becomes more popular and more competitive at the same time such that the ratio between its popularity and competitiveness remains the same, its KEI should increase.

But, KEI is not always useful. Even a term that has less popularity and few competing pages can generate a High KEI. Such a term would hardly be of any use to you. Thus, even after doing a KEI analysis, you must eliminnate terms which are of no use. You can either use Wordtracker to calculate the KEI or do it your way in a excel sheet.

STEP 8 : MAKE COMBINATIONS

Never optimize your website for a single term. Not only is the term extremely general but will have competition which might take you years to rank even in the top 50.

Always, make combinations. For eg: Never use “flash” as a keyword, use it in combinations with other words, like “flash tutorials” or “flash gallery tutorials” or “flash action script”. Thus, not only are you optimizing for a broader range of keywords, but also for the word “flash”.

Also Read :

• 21 Free Keyword Density Analyzer tools to optimize your website
• 12 Absolutely Free Keyword Suggestion tools, Popularity tools
• 18 Handy Keyword & Link Analysis tools

In the next post, we will learn how to make your website search engine friendly.