March 23, 2007 21:42
Category: Optimizing
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Admittedly, keyword selection is the first step toward larger objective of optimizing webpage(s) for search engines. The 2 basic steps of organic SEO techniques can be said to be the following:
- Structuring the html of a webpage in such a way that a main keyword is positioned at strategic places in order to attach importance of the keyword with respect to that webpage, which in turn is expected to draw search engines' attention while displaying result pages for your keyword as the search term.
- Creating backlinks as many as possible pointing to your webpage from other 'respected' webpages, where each such backlink will have your keyword as the anchor text.
While the first one is relatively easy but painstaking, the second step is undoubtedly difficult. Which is why the latest fad in gaining supremacy in search results is an expert work of linkbaiting. See my article, Linkbaiting, What Takes?
Coming to the topic at hand, most webmasters and/or website owners acknowledge that keyword is important for better search rank. What however still lacks is a good understanding of 3 main issues, viz. keyword selection, using keyword research tools, and lastly, placing keywords at vantage places in the html.
In this article, we'll discuss how an innocuously simple trick can help in keyword selection vis-a-vis your competition.
As you've by now discovered, this webpage is attempting to focus on the keyword, keyword selection. If you notice, I've taken care to position my chosen keyword at places that are considered important for search engine optimization of this page. Before that though I've done a small experiment to find out how competitive is the keyword in question, keyword selection. How?
Broad Search
Since I've chosen keyword selection to be the phrase to focus on (remember, experts say it is always a better idea to use keyword research tools to select your keywords), I do a broad search in Google for the term (without quotes). The results page shows that there are about 20,500,000 pages that have the search term. Are these pages my competition?
The answer is 'no', because many of the results that have shown up have the 2 words keyword and selection spread randomly in the pages.
Exact Match Search
An exact match search for keyword selection (enclosing them within quotes) fetches 181,000 results, which means all these pages do indeed have the 2 words used in succession, the same as I'm doing. Yet they may not still be my competition. The reason? It's likely that much fewer than them are actually optimized for search engines.
Title Tag Search
As is known, any properly optimized webpage must have the targeted keyword in the title tag of the page. This is the minimum, but there are other equally important steps for optimization. Okay, let me do the title-tag search in Google for my chosen phrase, keyword selection. The search query will be intitle:"keyword selection".
The search amasses 2,110 results. These then are my actual competition. Still the chance remains that quite a few of these haven't done other optimization steps. There is no way to know that except visiting the pages and checking their html.
Note how we have arrived to just 2,110 results from 20,500,000 we got for simple broad search for the term, keyword selection.
More Testing
I've said above that SEO experts always suggest using keyword research tools. For, how else will I know which keywords are the ones I must use! Did you say guessing the keywords? Well, that's a big mistake. Because the keyword I think is important to my site may not be a popular one at all. Which is why keyword research tools are so vital to lend credence to organic optimization efforts.
Given that, you may still like to do some more testing, if only for academic interest. Let's do title-tag search again, this time for "keywords selection" (note the plural). The result shows only 589 pages, a lot less competition.
Conclusion
When you use keyword research tools and cobble together a handsome list of likely keywords for your site, you may do 2 things. A title-tag search will inform you which of those are less competitive (good to pursue).
Next, why not do the same with minor variations? For example, in my case, they can be "selection keyword" (brings 10 results), "selection keywords" (27 results), and so on.
Do whatever, but you cannot escape the need of careful keyword selection. That's for sure.
