Choosing Keywords for Optimization

If you have set up your website and have not gotten much traffic yet, you might want to consider ways to boost your online presence as you work your way up the search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which comes down to making your website more appealing to engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft so they will ‘pick you’ as the most informative site on a specific subject.

The ranking on the SERPs is supposed to be by the value your site has to the consumer – for a specific set of keywords typed into the search box, the engine tries to return what the customer wants. This is why it is so important to optimize your website, content, title tags and anchor text for the keywords you want to rank for.

What might those keywords be? My fictional site, ‘PetsStyles’ markets pet clothing, with a niche market for dog and puppy hoodies. I want to concentrate on the keywords that people would type in if they were looking for products similar to the ones I carry.

People might type in ‘pet clothing’, ‘animal clothes’ ‘dog apparel’, ‘doggie coats’, ‘puppy hoodies’ or any variation or combination! I need to do a search to see what terms have the highest search volume. I also need to research things from the advertising point of view, to see which terms are probably being optimizing heavily already.

I can do this with a program like Google supplies with their Webmaster Keyword Tools, which can also be used to determine ad costs if I decide I need to start doing advertising as well. For now, however, I am just trying to find out what the ost searched keyword phrases are and which ones I might have a chance of ranking for.

If you remember, this is how I found my hoodie niche, by pulling up the keywords and phrases related to my site and zooming in on ones with a decent amount of searches and hardly any monetization.

Something interesting pops up right away. ‘Pet clothing’ is searched for quite a bit, (over 14,500 searches a month) and advertising dollars for those keywords keeps pace. ‘Clothing for pets’ only gets about 400 searches per month, but has a decent amount of advertising spend as well. However, ’clothing pets’ actually gets around 4,000 searches per month – and advertising is almost nil!!!

Wow. It just goes to show – grammatically correct search doesn’t always win out. I run a quick search using ’clothing pets’ just to see what comes up. What do you know. No exact matches for that particular keyword phrase.

I decide there and then that I am going to run a quickie campaign to get ranked for those keywords. This can be tricky, as the keyword phrase is clumsy – ‘clothing pets’ isn’t that easy to fit in to content! With a little creative use of punctuation and sentence structure I should be able to cope fairly well, though!

Tomorrow – Managing Clumsy Keyword Phrases in your Content