Keywords
A ‘keyword’ or a ‘key phrase’ is a word or string of words, of which you would like to rank for. A keyword could be anything from ‘SEO’ through to ‘UK Web Design Shop’. Keywords can also come into a phrase such as ‘SEO in the West Midlands’ this is also known as ‘long tail keywords’.
Keywords will usually represent some aspect of your business either location or products. Most keywords will now be highly competitive, that being said; being competitive does not mean it’s impossible to rank for these ‘keywords’.
Choosing Keywords
When choosing keywords it is important to do your research, this can be done with numerous tools (we will discuss this in a later tutorial) or by trawling Google for hours to find how competitive these words actually are.
When choosing a ‘keyword’ or ‘key phrase’ you need to make it relevant to your content. You cannot just put in to your text any kind of mumbo jumbo; it must make sense and relate to the content of the website.
Our keywords are rather competitive so we have taken a different approach to getting on the first page of Google. We have made sure we appear for at least two dozen keywords and phrases with lesser competition. This tactic means that our traffic sky rockets and our rankings for the more competitive words come in time.
We are always optimising for the main words we want to rank for but have a solid base to work from with this tactic.
Less is more in this case; we want to target niche traffic in order to get quality leads. This also leads to competitors trying to optimize for these keywords in the long run, as the click rate is very high, the impressions are high, leading to great exposure.
Don’t forget that Google passes on free traffic. Your goal is to be number one in as many searches as you can be for your chosen keywords.
Keyword Research
The best way to research keywords is via a keyword research tool, but firstly you will need to start thinking like a potential customer or client.
Ask yourself if you were searching for your website how would you search? I.e. what words, phrases would you use?
You will need to start with the basics, what your website is about. Ours is about web design, SEO and branding so we need to optimise towards these words.
I find the best way to figure out keywords is to group them; I have a tiered system and work from most competitive down. When implementing the campaign I start with the least competitive and make sure the site ranks for that if it can’t rank for a less competitive term it’s very unlikely it will for a competitive term so we need to figure out why.
You can use a multitude of web based research tools to find out about your website and your competitors which will be included in upcoming tutorials.
Implementing Keywords
There is no optimum density for keywords, most agree that from 0.5% to 1.5% is a good ratio, but in all honesty I don’t think that it makes much difference as long as you have quality content.
The best way to implement keywords into your website is to write naturally, structure your sentences, get your grammar right, and focus on what you want to say.
Display an ability to write great content for potential clients to read first and then check for your chosen keywords after. Personally I tend to write all content in word first so I can check the quality of the content first.
After writing the content I will then start to work out where naturally the keywords fit, work and stay legible.
If I was writing a paragraph for my website about SEO services and wanted numerous keywords to show a range of services like being ‘Affordable’, offering ‘SEO’, ‘Web Design’, and being based in ‘West Midlands’ I would write:
“Need SEO? We can help your business grow in 2016 with our affordable SEO services. UK Web Design Shop is based in the West Midlands and specialises in optimising your existing web design for SEO purposes. SEO can be expensive, but our web design and SEO specialist always come in on budget and on time.”
This is done with natural sentences and is easily read by the end user.
Keyword Stuffing
There is a lack of quality research into how negative keyword stuffing can be, but from my 15 years experience it tends to get you pushed down the rankings as it looks like web spam.
Keyword stuffing is taking a word and stuffing it un-naturally into sentences or paragraphs. You can always tell a quality site from its content, and how well it is written.
An example of a keyword stuffed paragraph would look something like this:
“SEO from the SEO experts, ‘SEO’ or ‘Search engine optimisation’ is a process of getting your website on the first page of Google. SEO is not easy to get right, so why not use the #1 SEO Company.”
Though the sentence structure is good and informative, the text is stuffed with the word ‘SEO’, this tends to show as spam as the amount of text is low and contains one word above all others.
I know what you’re thinking this seems like a perfectly fine sentence but in the world of SEO and of Google anyone can write a short and stuffed sentence, Google likes quality content that aids the user experience.
Summary
In summary the correct research combined with the correct keywords will produce results no matter how keyword dense your text, and regardless of backlinks in certain cases.
This is just a quick scoot around keywords a further tutorial into each area will be published soon.