One of the best investments in your SEO time is targeting the proper keywords for the type of people you want visiting your site. By explicitly choosing and targeting keywords on your site, you can maximize your site placement (and even page placement) on the search results list.

While it is most important to target the proper keywords for your main page, it is also very useful to per- form the same targeting functions on your most important articles. Each page that ranks highly on the search engine will increase the amount of traffic on your site, as well as the likelihood the visitor will look at other content on your site. It is essential that you get the visitors “in the door.”

Creating a Keyword Starter List
To obtain good ranking on the search engines, you need to know what popular keywords relate to the topic area of your Web site. For example, if your Web site focuses on personal improvement, do people enter “personal improvement” into the search engines when they are looking for your type of site? Or, do they instead look for “self help,” “self improvement,” or “life coaching”? Until you know this information, your site placement will depend more on luck than anything else.

Before you begin your research, spend 10 minutes creating a list of the terms that you think are most likely to relate to your site content. To find effective keywords, you need somewhere to start. Staying on the personal improvement topic, the list would begin like this:

❑       Personal improvement

❑       Self help

❑       Self improvement

❑       Life coaching

❑       Personal productivity

❑       Self reliance

❑       Support group

❑       Motivation

If you don’t know where to begin, try looking up your central topic in an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). The encyclopedia entry will likely have many of the terms that relate to the field that your page addresses.

Using a Keyword Finder Tool
Once you have your starter list of keywords, you’ll need a keyword finder tool. You can use an online ver- sion such as Google Adwords Tools (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) or a desktop application such as the excellent freeware Good Keywords.

If you put the previous starter list into Google Adwords Tools, it provides a list of all the most used search keywords that are related to the ones that were entered. By default, the keywords are listed alphabetically. You can easily sort by any of the columns simply be clicking on the column header.

The top 10 keywords by search volume were the following:

❑       group support

❑       inspirational quotes

❑       motivation

❑       motivational

❑       self help

❑       support group

❑       support groups

❑       achievement motivation

❑       adhd support groups

❑       aids support groups

As you can plainly see, the starter keyword list did not match the most used search phrases that the largest target audience would use. For the number one match, “group support,” the starter list had these same two words, but in the opposite order! That would mean significant loss of page placement because other pages with the words in the correct order would look to the search engine as more rele- vant than your page. Knowing the popular variations of your main keywords is critical to pursuing an effective SEO strategy.

Take the top 30 terms you found in your keywords search and add them to your starter list — do not replace your starter list. The number one search term may mean it is the most popular entry that people use to find a particular sort of site, but it also likely means that there is the most competition in that area. By targeting keywords that are less popular, you will be able to be a large fish in a small pond (but that “small pond” will still be immense).

Finding the Sweet-Spot Keywords
Take your list of keywords, and start by entering the first term into a search engine. For simplicity, this discussion uses Google for these examples.

 First, put the keywords into the engine using quotation marks so that only sites that have these exact words are returned. When you enter “group support,” Google tells you that it found 1,190,000, and that’s a lot of competitive Web sites. Just as important, by examining the list of returned sites, it becomes apparent that a number of them relate to electronic collaboration and groupware — not exactly the target audience.

Record the number of sites returned by Web search. Even though the keywords “group support” seem to have a large number of pages returned, some of the other terms may have even more. For example, on the fifth keyword phrase, “self help,” Google returns 20,300,000 pages. The mere million pages for “group support” now looks more attractive.

Search for all of the terms on your keyword list, and record the number of pages returned. You will surely find a few of the pages hit the “sweet spot” where many people are searching using those terms, but there are relatively fewer sites that are returned by that search phrase. These sweet-spot keywords are the ones that you want to target for highest placement.