By : Admin

Keywords play a very important role in the ranking of your website because people simply not arrive at your website but they find it through a keyword search in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Thus, the first and most important step to achieving higher search engine ranking is to become crystal clear on which keywords you want to target.

Your job is to determine what keywords your ideal customer would type into the search engines, and then build your search engine optimization strategy to target those keywords. The process for determining the best keywords isn’t really easy. It does involve a lot of time and efforts. In order to get highly effective keywords, you might outsource your job. Many people think they know how to do keyword research, but rarely will they do the steps that really matter. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Find a seed keyword: A seed keyword is basically a root word. This gives you or your keyword researcher a solid idea of where to start.

2. Set context: The next thing to stress upon is the context of the keyword. That is, what types of words you are looking for. Whatever your intentions are is fine. It’s just at this step that you provide some boundaries for what you’re looking for.

3. Set-up target: This is a pivotal area. Remember you can really only optimize a page for one or two keywords. So, it would be much beneficial to stress upon few but crucial keywords rather than optimizing for a huge pile of keywords which may in turn be a sheer waste of time and efforts. As the next step, you would need to acquire a competitive number of inbound links to each of these pages in order to outrank your competition and get any visitors from the search engines.

4. Specify: You need to be clear on what information you’ll have to weigh in order to decide if a keyword is worth targeting. This means you need to understand how search engines rank your web pages compared with your competition. The process is somewhat like this.

First of all, search engines look at your individual web pages. They determine how relevant your web page is to different keywords, which they derive from the content and composition of your page.

Then they need to determine how important your web page is compared to the millions of other somewhat-relevant pages in their indexes. They do this by looking at how many other websites link to your page and to your website generally, and how important these other sites are, in their eyes.

So, assuming that you are going to create pages that are highly relevant to your keywords anyway, your one main concern is how difficult it will be to out-rank your competition on the search engine results. This can be measured by how many good quality inbound links they have to the page you want to out-rank.

Search engine ranking algorithms are closely guarded secrets. But in broad strokes, this tells you how easy or difficult it will be to compete for a given keyword. So, you can proceed this ways:

1. Use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker to come up with an initial list of 1000 keywords by using the seed keyword.

2. Manually go through that list and select only the highly-relevant keywords according to the context. This probably pares the list down to 50 or so.

3. For each of the 50 keywords on this shortlist, individually go to Google and type each keyword in to the search engine and look at the top 10 search results.

4. For each of these top 10 search results, go to Marketleap and type in each of the web pages and record the number of inbound links in a spreadsheet. It isn’t important to record the URL’s of each of the competitors, just their search result rank.

At the end of the day, you need to know which keywords to target and there is only one way to get this information: diligent research and you are well on your way to better search engine ranking for your website.

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