Secrets of SEO and Selecting Your Keywords

So you’ve read somewhere that link building is the answer to increasing your sales online.

Link building is very important, and probably counts for more than 60% towards top rankings. Before you do any managed link building, one of the most important things you can do before departing with your money is a keyword research exercise.

Important: Your ultimate objective shouldn’t be just to get lots of traffic to your site from high rankings (although this is important), but instead should be to get a high sales conversion. Having a #1 listing in Google means nothing unless you can convert visitors to your website into satisfied customers or have them at least take a next desired action like filling out a form.

Most people enter search phrases that consist of between two and five words. Your most important keywords are those best and most relevant search phrases you want your website to be found for on a search results page in Google. We have seen this many times with businesses wanting to be top for example, the keyword ‘gifts’ when they are better off focusing on ‘romantic gifts’ as this was their specialist area anyway.

So how do you determine which keywords are most important and relevant for your website?

There are some tools that you can use, with out you having to type in all the keywords in Google.By using the following keyword tool, Keyword Discovery (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com) Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker are effective tools and work by analyzing the true search habits of people on the Internet.

Good free tools that you can use areGoogles adwords external keyword tool – (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

Find more SEO Tips at http://www.Rankability.co.uk

Before you do anything else you should first brainstorm and make a list of all possible words and phrases that you think a customer may use to find your products and services.

Don’t include industry jargon, acronyms, or buzzwords that only experts in your industry or marketers would know. You can also use these tools to estimate beforehand how much traffic you can potentially expect to receive so it is an invaluable tool for general business research. Here are some tips when using these tools.Pay attention to the word form. See whether the plural form or the singular form of a keyword phrase has a higher Search number. This is important as one form of your word will be more important than another Export your results to Excel where you can then easily sort your data into decreasing volume order.

Next, Find your Primary Keyword Phrase?
This is your Primary Keyword Phrase and is the one phrase that will be included on all your web pages, particularly on your home page.In general, this will be your most generic and most competitive phrase, thus it will also be the most difficult to rank well for.

You should also have several other phrases that represent more specific or refined variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase.These phrases will be used on your specific product or lower category pages.

For example, let’s use a website that sells vegetable seeds online:
Primary Keyword Phrase: “garden seeds”Specific variations: “home garden seeds”  “vegetable garden seeds”

See how the Primary Keyword Phrase is contained within the more specific phrases? This is the perfect situation. Realistically, how difficult do you think it would be to get a top ranking for, say “gadgets”, “web design”, “cars” or “insurance”? You’d be competing with millions of other web pages and with websites that have been around a lot longer. The secret is to go for verticals and less competitive searches.

List your Secondary Keywords
These are your Secondary Keyword Phrases that, while also highly relevant to your website or business, are not searched on as frequently as your Primary Keyword Phrase. Using the example above, here are some Secondary Keyword Phrases for “vegetable seeds”: Secondary Keyword Phrases: “vegetable seeds” “organic vegetable seeds” , “garden vegetable seeds”, “vegetable seeds plants”, “vegetable seeds catalog” “new potato vegetable seeds”
Secondary Keyword Phrases should also be used on your site, just not as frequently as your Primary Keyword Phrase.

Specialized Keyword Phrases Convert Better The more specialized or targeted your keyword phrase is, the more targeted your audience, the more qualified the potential traffic, and hence the greater the potential sales conversion rate will be on your site. Do not discount keywords just because KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker shows a low traffic value – singly they may not bring much traffic but collectively they can. A large percentage of search is very targeted and specific using multiple words – this is called the “Long Tail” search term. Don’t try to rank highly on one-word and even competitive 2-word phrases – instead try 3, 4 and 5-word phrases. These are a lot easier to rank well for because the majority of your competitors are all chasing the same generic words and aren’t thinking about digging deeper. One easy way to get more specific is to put a geographic modifier in the keyword phrase (if applicable to you). If you are an insurance advisor in London for example, stop trying to optimize for the competitive “insurance advisor  ” phrase and instead try for “insurance advisor  london” since your business is confined to that geographical area anyway. In short, focus on depth, not breadth on your site.

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