Search Engine Optimisation
A guide to SEO for the small business owner
This site is maintained by Seggy T Segaran, author of the book “The battle to get traffic to your website”.
Keyword strategy - keyword research
Potential customers that are looking for the product or service that your company supplies are going to find your web site by entering keywords in Google, Yahoo or other search engines. Keyword research allows one to understand what these keywords are so that you can work on making sure that your customers are finding your web site using search engines.
A common misconception amongst many is to say “When I enter my company name in Google, Yahoo and other search engines we are on top position, so we must be doing all right on the web”. Unless they know your company already, these are not the keywords that the customer is entering to find you.
Keyword research example
For example, if the customer is looking for headsets for their telephone, they are going to enter “telephone headsets” or “phone headsets” as keywords in the search engines. If they know of a particular make of headset, then they may enter “Plantronics headsets” as a keyword using the name of a popular manufacturer. During our keyword research we need to look at how many web pages Google and other search engines finds for these different keywords.
When you enter telephone headsets into Google as a keyword, the search engine will bring up search results containing the word telephone and the word headsets. The total number of search engine results can be misleading. As part of your keyword research, please enter the keyword search strings in inverted commas “telephone headsets”. Google will now only search for relevant pages where the two keywords occur together.
For the keywords “telephone headsets” Google comes up with 135,000 search results, for “phone headsets” it comes up with 177,000 search results and for the keywords “Plantronics headsets” it comes up with 95,500 search results. This keyword research signifies the competition that you are facing in trying to get to the top of Google with these keywords and increase the traffic to your site. If you are operating in a niche area for example supplying “low cost telephone headsets” then there are only 5 search results for these keywords so your task is less daunting.
Summary: Keyword research for Search Engines
Choose your target keywords carefully. Put yourself in your customers position and think of what keywords they may be using when searching for you on Google, Yahoo or other Search Engines.
