How to establish keywords for your website

What keywords should I use?

Before writing any html code for a webpage you should perform some sort of keyword analysis. Most website development totally ignores this step with corporate websites being guilty of this most. This step is most crucial in making sure that real people NOT in your industry find you. Knowing who you customers are helps.

Some questions you need to be able to answer are:

• Is your audience likely to search for industry standard terms or simple layman phrases?
• Which products/services have the highest profit margin? If you had just a $0.50 mark-up on a very popular product/service, could you sell enough online to make a profit? A product that is less searched but has a higher profit margin would be easier to obtain a search engine ranking and would yield higher revenues.
• Identify your biggest competitors. View competitor websites and see which products they appear to target; which search phrases do they have rankings for?

So here are a few steps you should follow to obtain the best keywords for your website.

Step 1: Real World Analysis

Send all your friends, family and colleagues an email or give them a sheet of paper with the following question on it stating specifically that you need 5 answers:

If you were searching for a web site with content identical to, or of the same theme as www.yourdomain.com, what word, or better word combinations (2-4 words) would you type into the search box? Please give 5 possible search terms or search term phrases that you believe are relevant to www.yourdomain.com content.

1 _______________
2 _______________
3 _______________
4 _______________
5 _______________
It is important to make sure you actually write a numbered list 1 to 5 leaving spaces for them to fill in! Otherwise you mightfind that you generally get just one or two possible keywords or phrases. As your audience to fill in all five.
Step 2: Analyze your competitors Keywords

You can best find your competitors websites by searching with what you believe to be your own top three keywords and taking a look at the source code of the top 5 web sites in the results. Paying special attention to the contents of the title tag (<title>…</title>) and of course the keyword <meta name=”keywords”… and description <meta name=”description”… meta tags is vital. These should help you get some keyword ideas. You can count on it that your competitors have done the same for their own sites.
Step 3: Analyze the most popular searches for your industry

Use keyword phrases instead of single keywords for high competition industries.

Plan for a maximum of only 3 keyword (phrases) per page.

Any more and you end up diluting the effect of any optimization for each of your keywords.

Understanding which keywords/Keyword phrases are being search by prospective customers is gold.

Chart of tools for popular searches
http://infopeople.org/search/chart.html

dwoz search trackers
http://www.dwoz.com/Default.asp?Pr=50

A good tool for Keyword suggestions is Overture
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

A Thesaurus might help identifying keywords for your industry.
http://thesaurus.reference.com/

Another Useful link is:
Google search Operators
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html