SEO Bootcamp: Learn the Basics of SEO in 2 Weeks (2016)

Chapter 4. Choosing Keywords to Rank

Now that you know who your target visitors are, you need to choose the right keywords that they will use when they search for information that you are offering.

To know the keywords that your target users are using, you need to put yourself in your target users’ shoes. You need to use the information that you have in the profile that you have created to guess the right types of language that you should use.

You also need to remind yourself of the limitations that the search engine technology have. You need to make sure that your keywords represent the types of content that you are showing in your page as well as the intent of your prospect visitors. Your ultimate goals it to provide what the prospect visitors need and then convert them into buyers, subscribers, members or, at the very least, return visitors.

Most beginner webmasters think that they should choose just one strong keyword and use that in all the pages of their website. To search engines, this strategy will look a lot like keyword stuffing.

If you want to make your website as the primary source of information for your topic, you need to aim to rank well on multiple keywords that are related to your website’s topic. If your website is about a TV show for example, you may want to target its title in your website’s home page. You should then create posts or pages related to the show like a page about the character. In this page, you may use this example“[TV show title] characters” as your main keyword.

There are free and paid tools that will help you find the most used keywords for certain topics. One of the most popular among them is Google Adwords Keyword Planner.

When planning your keywords, you should also consider the following factors:

· The name of the products or services that you are offering

This includes the generic name of the service and the brand. Some people who are thinking of purchasing something usually know the brand that they want to purchase so you should have website content that directly addresses the questions about these brands. These types of content will help your website be found through search.

· Related topics regarding your products or services

You should also provide content for topics related to your product or service. Many company websites for instance, include company updates. This shows activity in your website. One of the most important ranking factor is frequency of updates.

· Seasonal popular keywords

You should also prepare search-marketing campaigns for seasons when high volume of sales and traffic is to be expected. For retail websites for example, Christmas, Valentines and Thanksgiving seasons are big events. In this season, people tend to look for ideas online for offline purchases. You should take advantage of people’s habit to splurge during these seasons.

Using Keywords when constructing your webpages.

Every time you create a blog post or a new webpage, you need to consider the target keywords that you will use. You should target one main keyword for each page or post you create. Your keywords should be in line with the activity that you want your visitors to perform. If you want your visitors to purchase something, your goal is to build a webpage targeting keywords used by searchers with an intent to buy. You could also make webpages with keywords used my searchers who are researching about specific products.

When you know the keywords to rank for, your next goal is to put them strategically in your webpage. When placing your keywords in these locations, you must make sure that they appear naturally. Your primary goal is for your content to be understood by human visitors. User experience is always more important than any SEO strategy. With that in mind, you should place your keyword in the following parts of your website:

· URL extension

It helps if your domain name already contains the keyword that you want to rank for. Most of the time however, you will need to insert the keywords at the later parts of the URL to make sure that it is included in the URL bar.

· Title Tag

The title tag gives the crawlers an idea of what your page is about. Generally, you need to add your keywords as early as possible in the title tag. The challenge with this strategy is when you have a creative title planned. Sometimes, putting the keywords in the early part of the title tag makes it sound awkward. You should prioritize user experience if this is the case.

· Near the top of the page

You should also include the keywords in the first paragraph of your content. Lengthy types of contents are not entirely scanned by crawlers. Aside from the title tag, crawlers also try to figure out what your content is about from the first paragraphs. This is why you need to include your keywords in these areas.

· Text content of the page

Aside from the first paragraph, you should also add the keywords 3-4 times in various parts of the content. In this case, you may need to make variations of the main keywords to make it sound natural and to avoid redundancy for the readers.

· Alt-attribute of images

You should also add sentences or descriptions of your pictures in the image’s alt-attribute. This will help your images rank well in the image search feature of search engines. You should make sure that you only include images related to your content. You should also try to make unique images and photos. This will make your images stand out in the image search result pages and may lead to higher click through rates.

Meta description

All the other attributes above will make webpages rank better in the search engine result pages. To keep your webpages ranking high, you need to make sure that people who see it click on it to go to your page. A webpage’s past click-through rates is also an important ranking factor.

Two important factors will improve your click-through rate in the search engine. The first one is the title of your content, which was discussed earlier in this section. The second one is the description under the title. Most content management software (CMS) will use the first part of the text content as the description by default. You should check with your CMS on how to add a meta description so that you can control the text that appears below your title in the search engine result pages. You need to experiment on different copies of your description to be able to arrive at the ones the yield the highest click-through rates.

Activity for Days 7 and 8: Do Keyword Research

When you already have a website and a specific topic to pursue, your next move is to find keywords and phrases that will help you reach your goals for your website. Refer to the tips in this chapter to understand how keywords work in SEO and how to use them. Aside from the ever-popular Google AdWords Keyword Planner, there are other free online tools that you can use when researching for the best keywords for your website:

Microsoft Bing Ads

This is Bing’s version of the keyword planner. If a large part of your website traffic comes from Bing, you should also use this tool.

Google Trends

Google trends provide you with the popular keywords used by people around the world. They also allow you to check what is popular in your country right now and in the past. You can also get insights on the fluctuation of popularity of certain keywords and phrases over the years.