How to choose the best keywords for your website

Choose the right keywords, and you will receive traffic, subscribers, and revenue. Your website will be a success. Select the wrong words, and you will be lost in the search results, an also-ran, forever trying, but never quite getting there.

In this article, I will explain how to find the best keywords for your website. At the same time, you will see that choosing good keywords can be fun and is also quite simple.

What is a keyword?

A keyword can be a word or phrase that someone types into the search engine or on their favorite social network when they are looking:

• for information
• to solve a problem
• to buy something

Hopefully, this will direct the users to a site with information on their search term. The keywords you use should be related to the content of your written articles or the products that you are promoting.

A keyword can be broad or targeted.

A broad keyword

Broad keywords are normally very short and aren’t specific. A broad keyword is one that many people search for because they may only have a general idea of what they’re looking for, eg. “work online” or “work from home”.

It is difficult to rank for these keywords because there are many websites that have articles about “work online” or “work from home”. The advantage of ranking well for a broad keyword is that you will receive a good deal of traffic.

Targeted keywords

These keywords are something specific that your site proposes. For example, letsworkonline.net gives information on online business opportunities. A targeted keyword phrase related to the site could be  “Is it possible to make money from online surveys?”

A user who searches for this precise keyword phrase knows exactly what they want. There is much less competition for these keywords so it is much easier to rank in the search engines. The drawback is that they receive a great deal less in the volume of searches per month.

Why are keywords so important?

If you want your site to get maximum exposure on the search engines and your content reaches its desired target audience you must have some great keywords. Keywords are at the start of almost all online transactions. Someone searches for a product or a solution to a problem on Google. If your keyword is on the first page you will get traffic and sales.

What makes a great keyword?

A great keyword is a search term that is highly relevant to your website or a post on your site. At the same time, your keyword should bring you some decent traffic to your site but, not be too competitive that it stops you ranking well in the search engines.
The question is – how do you find all this data?

How to find those good keywords.

Keyword Research

When researching I think it’s a good idea to start broad. This way it enables you to find keywords that you would never have thought of and also it is easier to come up with broad keywords,

I know that we are looking for more targeted keywords, but from these broad keywords, we will get ideas for our targeted keywords.

Once the broad keyword has been selected, you need to open the keyword tool that you use. Normally I use Jaaxy, but any keyword tool is fine. For this example, I am going to use the keyword tool at Wealthy Affiliate.

Now enter your broad keyword. For this example, I am going to use swimming pools and little by little we are going break it down to a targeted keyword.

The results I got are here.

From this list, I chose to dig a little deeper with the keyword above ground swimming pools to find a more relevant keyword.

There I have come up with some good keywords that depending on the competition I could probably rank for in the search engines. For this example, I will check the competition for above ground pool decks.

With a competition (competing pages in Google) of 177, this would be a great keyword.

Google Suggest

There is also another way of finding ideas for keywords using Google. Type your search term into Google,  it starts giving me some related suggestions. Google generally shows the most popular searches first. In this case, as you can see there is nothing interesting for us, but often it can give some good ideas.

Walk Through the Alphabet.

Since the last step wasn’t productive I am now going to type the letters of the alphabet after the search term starting with “a” and going on through the alphabet to see if I find anything of interest. I did get a few ideas, the one I liked the best was:

Swimming pools mp3 – waterproof mp3 players that could be sold as an accessory for the pools and is something I hadn’t thought about in relation to swimming pools. I hope you get the idea. With this example, you would have to change the wording so it makes sense to something like swimming pool waterproof mp3 player. Now you can put this term in your keyword tool and check the traffic and competition.

We can do the same process, but this time putting the letters in front of the search term.

As you can see with the letter “a” I had some possible keywords. Again, we would put our selections in the keyword tool to check the traffic and competition.

As you can see the alphabet method is an awesome way of finding keywords and getting some great ideas.

Google Related Searches

Another useful resource! Every time you carry out a search on Google, you will find a list of related search terms at the bottom of the page. This can be good for either finding keywords or other keyword phrases to use in your content.

Google and the other search engines will use synonyms or related keywords to understand what your page is about. This is known as latent semantic indexing.

Question and Answer Sites

Another way to find keywords is by going to the question and answer sites such as ehow.com, wikihow.com or yahoo answers. This will give you some keyword questions where you can provide the solutions in a post or article.

You can type in a broad keyword or I typed in a question. In a few seconds, I had some more potential keywords.

With theses different methods you are now capable of finding hundreds or thousands of keywords.

Keyword List

Now you have some keywords you have to store them somewhere. Most research tools have a keyword list feature where you can save your keywords. Otherwise, you can save your list however you want in Word, Google docs or simply a written list. Just keep the list handy for when you need it.

Criteria and Traffic

Now you have your list of keywords you can start writing articles for your website. Your keywords should fit the following data.

(1) Under 400 competing pages in Google
(2) At least 50 clicks per month traffic

I prefer to have under 100 competing pages, the lower the competition the easier it is to rank for a keyword. The amount traffic can also be quite small because if you can rank on the first page of Google for a keyword you will get traffic. Whereas, if you only rank on the 3rd or 4th page of Google you probably will not get any traffic. That is because people tend to only look at the first page of search results.

So having a few pages on the first page of Google with 50 or fewer clicks per month will still give you more traffic than having a keyword on the 3rd or 4th page of Google even if it is a keyword that gets much traffic.

Final thoughts

You now understand how to find those good keywords for your site. Having your list of great keywords, you will need to put them into use. This means incorporating them into your blog posts or articles.

Use your keywords naturally, don’t stuff your articles or posts with keywords. The search engines won’t like it and more importantly neither will your readers.

Do you have any other suggestions for finding those good keywords for your site? If so please leave me your ideas or any comments, I would love to hear from you.

Thanks

Peter