Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that aims in putting your website up on search engines, is said to as important as the fundementals of web design. Before people ever visit your website, 90 percent of them use search engines for searching things they like.
With about 30 percent of all search engine traffic comes from websites that are on their first page, it all begins with words typed into a search box.
Keywords are the phrases used when searching for information through a search engine. The keywords that appear in your contents will influence search engines to show terms that are visible on your page. To do so, keyword research and strategy is essential for SEO success, and your overall marketing campaign.
Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the internet's search marketing field. As ranking for the right keywords can boost your website's visibility, it can be either make your campaign successful, or deliberately break your influence. Why? Because SEO is not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors.
By researching your market's keyword demand, you need to learn more about your customers as a whole. With keyword research, you can predict the shifts in demand, respond swiftly to your market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that people are actively seeking and actually like.
Before initiating anything else, ask yourself whether a specific keyword is relevant to your website's content or not. By answering that, you will know what keywords are best to describe your website. Another thing to consider is to make your visitors happy when they visit your site using that keyword.
To aim for the search engines, you need to know how search engines work in the first place. Search engines use crawlers they call "bots" to scan every piece of content you have. As they scan your contents, they will rank what words (keywords) they think are best. What keywords analysis do is to make search engines see the keywords that describe you the way you want.
Understanding which websites already rank for your chosen keyword gives you insight into the competition. By knowing the demands and the supply, you will know which keywords will rank for a given term, and how hard it is to compete.
By having the information, you can determine the value of your keywords.
Keywords Research
To do a keyword research for strategy, you need to get all the information about the demands and their referrals. Sources like Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool, Google Trends, Microsoft Bing Ads Intelligence, and others can give you valuable insight about what can be best to suit your website's niche.
By researching for the best keywords for your website by using the above tools, you will know what keywords have high demands, and the estimated search volume. More information such as the cost of running paid campaign for the terms can be beneficial.
Other sources for keyword information exist, as do tools with more advanced data.
After getting all the information needed to choose the best keywords for your site, the next thing is to implement those keywords on your site.
Before Google changes and updates its algorithm, the search engine determined a page's relevance to a particular search term entirely from its keyword density. Pages that have the keywords repeated several times, for example, would rank higher. Strategies such as styling the keywords with bold and/or italic will put more weight to them as well.
However, these practices have been abused. Webmasters, web owners and SEO enthusiasts have realized the weakness and put it to their advantage. They increased their keyword density to a level that results in a content that is annoying to read.
Google responded by changing its algorithm. So instead of making those websites rank high, they're deemed to be penalized, classed as spam, and worst of all, removed from its result's page.
For that matter, keyword density is less important in determining a page's rank.
What Google appreciates is the use of keywords in places that are relevant and informative. For example, a website that is in the clothing business, have pages with clear titles, descriptive topics, proper navigation with proper links, optimized meta attributes, and so forth, would make it stand out better.
Understanding Long and Short Tails Keywords
Short-tail keywords are the basic words and phrases that make up the majority of search queries. In a niche like "clothes" for example, your short-tail keywords would be words like "dress", "trousers", "shirts" and so forth. These terms drive a lot of traffic, and they are targeted by many people in the clothing business.
How does it feel to rank well for a keyword "clothes"? It's great to know that a single word like that can generate thousands of searches a day. But in fact, popular searches actually take less that 30 percent of all searches. The remaining 70 percent comes from "long tail" searches.
Long tail keywords are the longer, more obscure phrases that make are used to take a much lower percentage of overall search terms. But as search engine's algorithm develops and the internet grows with more and more information, long tail keywords are getting more traffic than ever. In the "clothes" niche, "wedding dress" and "casual shirts for adults" are attracting more traffic. Long tail searches are typically short tail searches modified by additional qualifying terms, like types, price, location and description.
Whilst long-tail keywords drive more search queries, they ratio they're searched and the ability to convert better is higher. They're less competitive, but can drive more traffic you can target them properly.
The reason for this is because a person searching for "clothes" is probably just browsing for information. While a person who is searching "the best price for Adidas shirt in Jakarta" is practically ready to buy.
Conclusion
Anyone can rank well in search engines by using the best matching demand to website keywords. However, since ranking well requires time and resources, it's not going to be an easy task unless you're already a big player with great influence.
Bigger business tends to have more experience in competing. Furthermore, they have bigger budgets to do a continuous research, buying traffic and maintaining their position in their niches.
But the show doesn't stop there, and there is still a chance for small businesses to compete. Thanks to long tail keywords, there are limitless possibilities of words combinations that you can use to beat those big players.
With less competition for these keywords, your business could rank for several long tail terms for the same cost as a single short tail. Since long tail keywords have the ability convert visitors to sales better, thriving on the internet is just a matter of mix and match, with a little bit of skill, experience and dedication on the subject.