Determining Your Best Keywords

The keywords you use for your website are important for your search engine optimization (SEO).  Your keywords are what search engine looks at when determining the relevance of your site to a person’s search query.

Your keywords can be behind your website (in the META tag area) and used in your webpage content. All these locations help raise your SEO.

How do you determine your best keywords?  

A keyword can be a single word or a phrase, but you want to choose a term that users are actually searching for. Keywords should be short. Fewer than 200 characters is best.

Create a list of every possible keyword you can think of (at least 50-100) for your industry. Try singular and plural words, change the order, include commonly used synonyms and even include common misspelling of words. I recommend keeping your list in an Excel spreadsheet for ease of use and so you can add to it as your products evolve.

The more your competitors are optimizing for the same keyword, the harder it will be for you to rank highly using it. You can determine how many of your competitors are trying to optimize a keyword by looking at how many of them are using the keyword in the title tag of their website. This can be done using Google's "all in title" command.

Simply type "allintitle" followed by a colon and the keyword you are evaluating to determine the number of sites optimizing for the keyword. For example, entering "allintitle:speech coaching" (note there is no space after the colon) returns much fewer results than just speech coaching because it only provides the websites that contain those words in their title tag.

If someone goes to the trouble of including specific words in their title tag, you know they are trying to optimize for them.

Sprinkle your keyword throughout your website content and be sure to include them in your blog posts too.