key words

In case you’re still lost as to how to go about getting the right mix of keywords for your website(s) here’s a fool-proof 5-step plan I use..

1. What is your site about?

What’s your niche and what are you trying to sell?

If your site is of public interest and has the potential of a lot customers from a wide spectrum of social categories then I would suggest you go for as many visitors as possible and therefore opt for more general keywords.

Keywords that have the potential to attract the highest number of visitors.

If on the other hand your site is selling a product which is aimed at only a minority of people then aim for targeted visitors and therefore very specific keywords that are directly related to your sites product theme.

2. Identify all relevant keywords and keyword groups.

Start by writing down all relevant keywords or keyword phrases that you can think of that relate to your chosen niche.

It doesn’t matter if some of them seem weak or unrelated to you, the next step is to check them.

You can use a tool such as overtures keyword selector tool. Type in your keywords and it will bring up different keyword phrases and tell you how many searches have been carried out for each one during the past month, enabling you to quickly identify strong keywords and sort your keywords in relevance to their total monthly searches.

3. Sort your keywords by relevance!

If you decided at step 1 that you’re interested in targeted visitors then create another list called “list 1″ -made up of the keywords that are directly related to your business and that have the potential to deliver targeted visitors, this list is not based a keywords power but rather its relevance to your sites audience.

The other ones will remain on a secondary list – called “list 2″. Both lists will be sorted in order of monthly searches and “list 2″ will held as a back up list in case all the keywords on “list 1″ are to powerful to compete for.

4. What is your competition doing?

You can do this various ways and don’t forget that just because a keyword has a lot of people searching for it doesn’t mean it is right for you.

If you try to compete with the Big Boy’s you will not win. So if you have to try and concentrate on some of the less powerful keywords and try to get in the top 5 for those.

Various methods of checking out your competition are by searching on google and noting down the url’s of the top ten for each keyword, then analyze each page and see if you can compete.

Next check their ranking using googles toolbar and alexa’s toolbar both free from the respective search engines.

Also check for backlinks and check for keyword relevance in their page titles and descriptions.

5. Selecting your keywords

By now you have narrowed down from “list 1 & 2″a shortlist of keywords that you feel you have a chance of competing for.

Sort them into key phrases and in order of weight i.e. their total searches.Try to get a phrase of 4 to 5 keywordsas this will make it easier to work into your page title and the search engines will love it.

Now you have your keywords and phrases. It’s now time bring the traffic to your website!

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