SEO Keywords Selection: How to select the best keywords for your SEO campaigns

Jude Festus    SEO    

Keyword selection is the most important step in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. Smart selection of keywords is the first step towards the success of your SEO campaigns. In this article I have presented the ways I use to select the keywords for my SEO campaign. For this discussion let me use the keyword “CRM”.

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

You’re targeting Google and definitely this is the first place you should go to select your keywords. Enter the keyword “CRM” and get the keyword suggestions by Google. Make sure you have selected your country of target in the field just above the search box. I usually keep the match type as “Exact” as this will give me more clarity on the keywords which I have to choose. After zeroing in the keyword which you’re planning to use, click on the “Google insights” button to view the search trend in Google over a period.

Export the selected keywords which you’re planning to target and keep this in one sheet and in the other sheet note the trends/position of all the available keywords. This will help you to prioritize your keywords based on the trend and the search volume.

Once you’re done with your keyword selection then next step is to verify your selection. There may also be some related keywords which you might have missed in your first step. So let’s make sure we haven’t missed any related keywords. Below are the few ways to verify your selection and ensure the quality of your selection.

1. Google Search Suggestion

Go to Google.com and type in your keyword CRM and Google will present you some related keywords as you typein. Note down all the keywords listed and click search with your search term “CRM” once again Google will present you with some related search suggestions. Take a note of this and compare all the keywords which you have selected during this process with your original list. If you found any new keyword using this method, go to Step one and check the search volume and trend of that keyword. Based on the search volume you can decide whether to add this to the original list.

Try different iteration with different related search terms and build your list.

2. Search in Wikipedia

This step will help a lot for the search engine service agencies who work on their client’s campaigns optimizing some difficult business terms or products.

Search in Wikipedia and read the relevant CRM article. This will help you to understand more about CRM and the related keywords. When you read the article note down the keywords (business terms, sub sections, images… etc) within in the article and check the global volume for those keywords as mentioned in the step 1.

3. Keyword Spy

Goto Keyword Spy and check the “Keywords” radio button and enter your keyword. In the results page the overview tab will give you some related CRM keywords and the “organic competitors” tab will show the top 20 competitors for that particular keyword. If you’re using a free version of the tool then you will get only limited results (upto 20).

This step will help you to compare and verify the keywords which you have chosen in using the Google keyword suggestion tool and analysis the competition for that particular keyword.

When you follow the above mentioned list you’ll get a very quality selection of keywords for your SEO campaign. These are the step I follow in my SEO campaigns for keyword selection. If you have a different view on these steps or if you follow a different strategy for your keyword selection please let me know and will be glad to add those to this list.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for beginners – Part1

Jude Festus    SEO, Search Engines    

For the SEO experts around there, this article is not for you. This article is for who are new to the field of SEO and for SEO aspirants. Below are some good SEO practices:

1. Use good title for your pages.
The title of the page should represent the content in the page. Identify the keywords in the page and shrewdly insert those keywords in the title. Use the important keywords in the beginning of the title.

Don’t
1. Never stuff too many keywords in the title
2. Never use too many comma separated words in the title
3. Never insert irrelevant keywords. (Irrelevant means, The keywords which don’t represent the content in your page)
4. Don’t exceed 70 characters

Instead of “Show me your friend and I will tell you who you are” i would say “Show me your title and I will tell you how good you are in SEO”

2. Using Header tags (H1, H2…) at the right places

When you write the content for each webpage make sure it has a content title and never forgot to mention that title inside a H1 tag and wrap the following sub headings inside the h2, h3… tags.

Though I know the use of the header tag, I haven’t included any header tags in one of my website (very very quality community based website), the reason is obvious, I don’t want to disturb the appealing design of the webpage by including a large text. Not surprisingly, for the keyword I targeted my website is in the 4^th page of Google (But it’s in the first page of Yahoo and MSN). Frustrated with the result, I included the keyword inside the H1 tag and placed it in the top of my homepage, just below the menu.

Result: Believe me, Just after three weeks my website is in the first page of Google. So what are you going to do, still worrying about your design or ready to get more visitors to your website?

Tips: Find the keywords inside that Webpage content and shrewdly include it inside the header tags.

3. Meta Tags: Still Alive?

The predominantly used meta tags by many SEO’s are Meta description and meta keywords. Well, That’s history now. The big “3’s” (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are now not considering the meta keywords. When your webpage has no text content, say a Flash page, Google consider the Meta description and list it in their web result. For example see the picture below:

So I would say, meta will not affect your search engine ranking.

4. Don’t keep a page size more than 100KB

Google loves the webpages with more text. Try to keep your webpage size under 100KB. Though Google lists all the webpages, which has the size under 150 KB, my advice is to keep the webpage size under 100KB.

Now the question is, Why Google is doing this? Is it because your webpage is cached in Google’s Server? Nope.

The straightforward answer to this is, “Google wants their visitors to be happy, They don’t want to lead their visitors to a webpage which takes more time to load”.

To be Continued >>

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – An Overview

Jude Festus    SEO     SEO

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing the website to bring in more traffic is the main motto for all the Search Engine Optimizers. How they do it? Are there any predetermined steps for that? SEO is not a rocket science, anyone who has very little knowledge in maintaining their website or blogs can follow it. In the coming blog posts I will blog more about SEO.

The search result for the term SEO yields 224,000,000 and the search result for the term “web design” yields only 141,000,000 results and that show how important SEO is!

Why is it important?

When you optimize your pages more shrewdly you can funnel your target customers to the correct page instead of them landing in the wrong page of your website.
Hope you got it how important SEO is! Meet you in the next post with more details on SEO.