Tips on Building an Effective Keyword

What are keywords? They are the word, combination of words or phrase that a user might search for to find a web site or page. Each variation of the word such as the plural form of the word, or even in my particular case, the US version of the word (I write in the UK) is treated like a separate keyword. Phrases i.e. a string of multiple keywords are still treated as a keyword. Generally phrases are treated as a keywords and many people search against phrases rather than single keywords.

Keywords play a vital role in helping search engines to categorise your content and help those searchers to find your page or blog.

To create a keyword list, make a list of all the keywords you might use to find your site on the search engines. These are the words that should be in your blog content at the very least.

So how do you increase your keyword list?

" What industry or product are you writing about? Every industry has its own keywords. A physiotherapist might use words like back or sciatica or neck pain. An artist might use paint brushes, colour etc.

" Use synonyms. There are lots of ways to say the same thing. You want to make sure that you optimize the keywords to match the different terms people might use when searching for the topic you are writing about. If you are talking about plants for example, you could use trees, foliage, leaves and so on.

" Think about your prospective audience. Different groups of people use different words to say the same thing. For example someone familiar with blogging might use the word blogging or blog. Someone else might call it a journal or a diary.

" What are your competitors doing? Have a look at some of them in google by typing in your keywords, see how they are moving up the rankings and get a feel for how they are working. If you click on VIEW, SOURCE in their browser menu bar, you can sometimes see what their keywords are if you sift through the html codes.

" Think of misspellings and include them in your tags. There are many different ways some words can be spelt and there are many ways to mistype them as well. Some of the keyword research tools allow you to search for misspellings as well. Don't use them in your copy but do list them in your keywords

" Use the keyword research tools in Google and Yahoo. They are free. Alternatively and if you are serious about making a business on the internet, subscribe to a programme like Wordtracker.

So what do you do with your keywords once you have your list?

" Include them in your copy. Include them at the very top of your page, the headline, sub headlines and the first and last paragraph.

" Be careful not to cross a line. Search engines calculate how often a word is used alongside other words. According to experts, having a keyword density of a particular word should be less than 12%, though many recommend 3-10% to be safe. So don't use it too often or it may be treated as spam and might not even get a foothold in the rankings.

" Once you have some copy, a useful tip is to run the text through a keyword checking online programme like wordcounter to find how many are in your content. Have a look at how many of your keywords are indeed in your copy

There is a lot to learn when you are first starting out but I reckon if you spend some time in thinking about keywords you will find it repays the time and effort a hundredfold.