Check SEO

Keyword Research

You have come up with a great idea for your next web project (or your first web project) and are getting ready to build your site.

Most people go out and build a website, then when after a few months of not getting any site visitors they either give up or think about trying to Optimize their site for the Search Engines.  If you do not plan for SEO to be part of the site-building process, you will probably spend a lot of time going back and almost re-building your entire site later on.

Part of your planning should be to do some research on keywords for your site and pages.  Your selected keywords form the basis for the SEO of your website.

It is getting harder and harder to get a new website to the top of the Search Engines, so your choice of keywords and knowing a bit about them is important to your success.  Search Engines index words (and phrases).  You want the words you choose to be words that are searched for and not too competitive.

Research Tips

Get out a sheet of paper and write down 10 to 20 words or phrases that describe what your website is all about.  For each of these words, you should then do the following

• Search for your words on The Big 3 Search Engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) - noting how may results are returned.
• Check Overture which shows the number of searches for a keyword and similar keyphrases.
• Select keywords that have high Overture results and low number of results in Search Engines
• Do searches on common mis-spelling of your keywords
• Choose specific phrases rather than general terms

Now we have our list of keywords and we can now move onto the next step.