In a layman’s parlance, keywords are nothing but words and / or phrases which people may use to locate your services, products, information or brands via search engines.

Step 1: Keyword Identification

The first activity in the keyword research process is the identification of keywords. Keyword identification means locating the keywords which are used by your target group. You look for related keywords. First, you identify the industry and then zoom into the specific field. For example, if you own this pet shop, you should take up keywords like: “cat food” and “dog food”.

Step 2: Locate Your Keywords

The second activity in the keyword research process is a more informed and technical search. It involves finding keywords that people actually use and organizing them by their popularity.

To locate keywords and find out their popularities, you can make use of the Aleksika keyword search box to know more about the search behavior of your target audience. Learn what they call things, the way they identify subjects, how broad or how precise their search generally is. These parameters become essential in looking for the right keywords.

You may also access relevant and useful ideas for keywords from the collection of top keywords containing the top one hundred keywords of the last year or maybe a keyword directory that offers keywords organized by subject. Wordtracker is one such program that allows you to look for relevant keywords.

Step 3: Choose Keywords

The method of deciding on the right keywords involves the following steps. Copy all relevant phrases and counts onto a spreadsheet. After you have made an examination of all individual words and phrases that might apply to your website, you will have every single important phrase on your spreadsheet.

Instead of making your search more vague and inaccurate, (which generally happens when you try to choose one-word keywords), it is suggested that you focus your concentration on only those keywords that can be easily managed. And that would typically mean phrasal keywords.

Now, consider the many times that you have probably used a search engine, and the many results which each of these searches have raked up. If you think about it closely you will probably discover that out of all those million SERP’s that you have opened up through your searches each time you have probably visited at the very most the first 3 pages of results, the rest you have ignored like they didn’t even exist.

As the owner of a website being thus ignored by visitors and sidelined by search engines has probably kept you up nights wondering exactly how you might better the position of your site. Well the answer is simple; through SEO.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization refers to a process by means of which a website earns high ranking amongst the search results, gets a coveted place on the SERP and thereby pulls in a large chunk of ‘unique’ visitors.

Who needs SEO?

Websites can broadly be classified into 4 different types:

• Personal sites
• Corporate Sites
• Sites providing information
• E-commerce sites

As is obvious the first two types of websites can hold their own without using SEO. That is because they are target group is in itself a niche and it doesn’t want or need audiences beyond that niche. However, that cannot be said for the last two types of websites. If you build a site primarily to circulate information or for commercial use then you would definitely need unique visitors, these may be found only by means of good ranking on SERP’s and therefore by means of SEO.

Watch your content, get the right visitors. If you want to lure the right visitors into your website then simply use the right words. Although search engines do not read they do scan the site’s text. The more relevant your content is the higher your chances of a better ranking.

Another important consideration, while on the topic of content, is keywords. Your keywords are words or phrases which summarize or represent the main topic or subject of your site, when a search engine scans the body of your website’s text it picks up these repeating words and match them with the words being searched if they match then you get a high ranking.

When selecting your keywords make sure you choose words which are most likely to be used by users searching for a site like yours or subjects covered by your site. After you have selected them sprinkle them abundantly within the text of your site. However be careful that you don’t unnecessarily stuff them at inappropriate junctures cause that might attract criticism or even a penalty. Your keyword density per page can be anywhere between 5-15%, depending on of course how skillfully you might choose to repeat them. Make sure that you use your key words/phrases freely in the first two paragraphs of the text. Also, remember to include them in the concluding line of your text. But most importantly use them in your anchor text, certain Search Engine’s like Google put a lot of importance on the anchor text of your inbound links.

Judge for yourself

Here are the reasons we think optimization is a must, you decide for yourself.

• More than 80% of net-users find websites by means of search engines.
• 90% of these users do not bother to check beyond the first 30 results.
• 75% of those using search engines intend to buy a product or service.
• “Professional SEO is twice as effective as all other internet marketing methods and 8 times more effective than banner advertisements.”