SEO Step By Step Guide: 7. Keyword Analysis Process Continued…

In the previous post, we saw that after our initial analysis we would have a long list of keywords, which will include both primary and secondary keywords. Now the question is, should you optimize your website for all those keywords? If you have a huge list of keywords, then you should not try to optimize your website for all the keywords. By doing so you will dilute the effectiveness of your primary keywords.

Therefore, the next step in the keyword analysis process is short-listing the keywords or finalizing your keywords. Ideally, you should not optimize each page for more than 5 to 6 keywords or key phrases. If you see websites optimizing their web pages for lot of keywords then you should know that it is not considered as one of the industry’s best practices. So you must try to filter the keywords carefully and optimize each page with appropriate keywords. You must keep this in mind when you are designing your website. The pages that you include in your website should give room for you to optimize your website in an effective way. This is one of the reasons we keep repeating that SEO should start much before the website is designed and not after the completion of your website design and development.

When you incorporate your SEO along with the development, it will blend well with your website. Otherwise, people will be able to see the artificial insertion of keywords or forced in keywords in places that really do not have a need for those words. On the other hand, when your website architecture takes into consideration your keyword requirements you will be able to come up with an SEO friendly architecture. This will also allow you to think of internal links ahead of time.

When some of your keywords have too heavy competition, you can tone down the competition by adding geographic qualifiers. You will be able to see the difference in the search competition with and without geographic qualifiers. For example, try these two set of keywords and see the difference yourself. Make a search using, “seo company” and also try a search with, “seo company Texas”. This should help you see how adding geographic qualifiers can make your website stronger in the searches. However, this may not be applicable for all the services or products. In case the nature of your business allows the usage of geographic qualifiers never forget to take advantage of it.

It has been noticed that longer keyword phrases tend to bring more targeted traffic than single word keywords. For example someone who is making a search using the term ‘web design’ may either be looking for a web design company or just be looking for information on web design to write an academic paper. If your company offers web design services, then by attracting stray traffic will not prove to be beneficial. Such traffic will only eat up your bandwidth. So give equal importance to longer key phrases as well in your optimization.

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