Effectively Targeting Keywords on Your Website

If you’ve been harboring any hope of being found in the organic search engine results, then you should have a good idea of what keyword strategy you want to use for your website. Randomly putting up page after page, no matter how pretty or seemingly useful, will all be for naught if there is no coherent plan for targeting keywords for your site. Let’s look at the basics of how this is accomplished.

Determining the primary keywords for your website is easier to do than you might imagine. First decide on what exactly your site will be all about, and then begin to research the terms. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you’re putting up a site about Jack Russell Terriers. You just love these dogs to death, and can’t wait to share your knowledge, and perhaps make a few dollars by offering a membership site, or ebook on breeding. Common sense would say that “dogs” would be the root keyword here, but you might actually want to get really niche-specific and start with “Jack Russell Terriers”.

“Dogs” gets a whopping 37.2 million searches a month, whereas “Jack Russell terrier” gets a still healthy 301,000 searches a month. Here’s where the difference comes along, however.

“Dogs” has more than 152,000,000 competing web pages. You would be hard pressed to beat that sort of competition anytime soon. “Jack Russell terriers” however has 224,000 competing web pages, which is much more reasonable competition. Further digging leads you to keywords like “Jack Russell names”, which gets 2,400 searches monthly and has but 9,830 competing pages. You could rank for this term quickly, which would increase the traffic to your site, and help get your site on the map. Finding other “long tail” keywords can only help in this regard. There are many different keyword combinations that could be put to good use, and the above search took but a few minutes to find a keyword that would be a good candidate.

There are many commercial keyword tools out there, but you can also use the free tools and do very well to start. The Google Adwords Keyword External Tool is free and gives you great data. WordTracker also has a free tool, and there are many more. Traffic Travis has a free version that is also useful.

Most of these tools return search counts. To get a feel for the competition, take your prospective term and put it in quotes in a Google search, e.g. “Jack Russell terriers”. This will return the number of pages that are optimized for this term.

To take it even further, do an “in title Jack Russell terriers” search. This will give you the number of web pages that have that term as part of the page title, a very good indicator of whether that term is being targeted.

Look at your competition and see what keywords they are targeting. A good tool for determining this is again the Google Adwords tool, using the “website content” option.

Once you’ve found the right keywords, you can begin creating content and site architecture that supports these keyword phrases and creating links using them, and before long you’ll be finding yourself ranking on Google when someone searches for them, which translates to the type of targeted traffic we all seek.