What Keywords Do I Pick?
So you are designing your site and you want to be found on the search engines for certain keywords. You are not going to be found for these words if they are not in your headlines and main content. So what keywords do you choose? You want them to be relevant to your site, but you also want words that will bring some kind of action from your visitors. That could be to make a purchase, click on an ad, sign up for a newsletter, or maybe request more information. Why would you pick keywords that don’t do anything for you?
The time to pick keywords it before you start to write your content. Nothing sounds more artificial that when an author tries to stuff keywords into some text that’s already written. So you want to pick keywords and then write content around them, but what keywords should you pick? That is a million dollar question and it’s been my experience that single keywords are generally less effective than a multi word keyword that more closely relates to what you have to offer. Finding visitors for “pants” probably won’t work nearly as well for you as “men’s dress pants” or even “men’s dress pants Pittsburgh PA”. Longer strings of keywords in addition to possibly being more effective towards your end goal tend to be much less competitive on the search engines so it’s much easier to get to the top. Common misspellings can be good, too (mens dress pants) as many people will type these in. This can be true if you are looking to optimize your site for the search engines to find you or if you are want to buy keywords for a marketing campaign.
Here’s a good post by Jake Matthews called “The Most Overlooked & Affordable Keyword Research Method” that may help you get started.
