SEO Basics – Keyword Selection and Optimization

 

Over 90% of site visitors (click-through) from search engine results pages come from the first page of results. So how do you get there? How do you place competitively for the terms most important to your organization? The goal of this blog is to help those involved in web content creation to achieve improvement in competitive search rankings via Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While Google keeps the totality of its algorithm tightly under wraps, we will stay on top of information released from Google and other search engines to continue to evaluate which factors are most affecting search engine rankings.
For our first blog post, we will focus on how you should select the keywords for which to optimize your site content. Keep in mind that the best attitude to take when approaching search engine optimization is– if it helps your end user find what they’re looking for, you’re doing something right. Overwhelming numbers of links and keywords used repeatedly are not helpful to the average user. Use your keywords and the other SEO practices we suggest here with moderation and where it makes sense to do so.

Step 1 – Evaluate Keyword Density

Evaluating site keyword density is an important first step in the SEO process. The saturation of particular keywords in your website demonstrates your website’s theme and purpose to search engines, such as Google. To evaluate what Google is already interpreting as your theme, there are plenty of free keyword tools out there that will allow you to evaluate your density in usage. Using these keywords in relevant moderation is equally as important as using them frequently and where it makes sense. The general rule of thumb is that keywords used frequently across your site should make up approximately 3% of your web content for a 500 word article. In this example, you would repeat the keyword (or a derivative, close related term) no more than 15 times in one article.

Step 2 – Evaluate Competitor Keywords

After you’ve identified which keywords you’re using most frequently in your site content, it’s time to evaluate the usage, density, and market saturation of words used by your competitors. Using Google Analytics and Google’s Keyword Tool to accomplish this is especially helpful. This tool will find derivative keywords of the terms your content is already using, and will make suggestions for additional keywords to use. The tool also displays the market usage of these terms, or in other words, how many competitive organizations are using these terms in their site and ad content. For example, let’s say you sell vintage action hero figurines. While terms such as “vintage toys” and “action figures” are relevant to your organization, they are also highly used around the Web and will be difficult terms for which to improve search rankings immediately. However, if you begin optimizing your content for a more specific set of niche keywords that are more specific to your organization and less frequently used by competition, seeing nearly immediate improvement in rankings for these terms is fairly easy. Over time, your rank for more general derivative keywords will improve as well.

Step 3 – Begin Optimizing and Tweaking Web Content

Use the steps above to help you refine your web content. After eliminating general terms and replacing them with your more specific subset of keywords, you’re ready for the next step– building relevancy and correlation in your web content.

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