Keyword Phrase Selection Best Practices
Excerpt: A great article from EsotericLabs.com - Search Engine Optimization 2.0
- Focus on your site first: Don’t always search for keywords with high traffic and less competition alone. Always discriminate first on the relevance to your site, not potential traffic.
- Wag your “Long Tail”: Half of searches performed on Google are unique. What does this mean? It means that the keyword phrases suggestion tools, in a perfect world, are only accounting for half the available search phrases and, in reality, will be more like 20% effective. Also look at this from a competition angle. Wouldn’t you rather be optimizing your site for those unique searches rather than depend on the tools approximately 99% of other webmasters use? Develop a content strategy with the “Long Tail” in mind. A great free/paid service that will enable you to exploit this strategy to the max is HitTail.
- Anchor your Positions: Now that your content strategy is inline, use your keywords appropriately in your incoming links.
- Study your Successes and Fix your Failures: If you are not tracking the effectiveness of your site, your may as well be driving blind. You may get to where you eventually want to be if you are the luckiest person on the planet. However, the carnage your excursion will produce will likely sink you before you even get started.
- Don’t Screw Around: While writing articles specifically targeted to any of your search phrases, make sure it is compelling from a user’s point of view. Spammy text, thrown together because you’re too lazy to come up with something interesting, won’t add value for your user and will only make you look bad in the end.
- Sustain your Efforts: If you are playing to win; play to win every day. The sites that are ranking well don’t get there by accident or half-assed effort.
Read about Keyword Selection Strategy at EsotericLabs.com. Read the “SEO “Not-for-Idiots” Guide to Keyword Selection” today.
