Choosing the Best Search Engine Optimization Keywords

Here's another SEO "How To" article on keyword optimizing.

Before you get into using any search engine optimization keywords, you need to think in terms of the user. What is the user typing in to get to this page? The more competitive an optimization keyword is, obviously the harder it is to rank. I could try to rank for the search engine optimization keyword 'soccer', but soccer is going to be incredibly competitive to rank for. Not only that, if someone types in 'soccer', are they really wanting soccer drills which is what I might be hypothetically selling. Yes, there is some correlation there. But if they type in 'soccer', they might be looking for photos of Ronaldo, or soccer scores. They could be looking for anything. When you are looking at soccer, you don't try to optimize for keywords that are so broad they are not going to hit your target market. You need to find a balance.

I don't want 'mating habits of Ethiopian mosquitoes', but we also don't just want 'mosquitoes'. If we look back at soccer drills, imagine this is your keyword 'how to improve your possession soccer drills'. I could rank for 'how to improve your possession soccer drills' because no one else would be ranking for it. However, what are the chances of someone typing that in? That's why we need to do research on the search engine optimization keywords we use. To do this go to the free Google keyword tool because that will tell you the actual search data. When you go to that tool now, it will say how many people are typing in that keyword every month.

So you want to try and find something to get that balance right, say I don't want to go for the keyword 'how to improve your possession soccer drills' but I don't necessarily want to go for 'soccer'. We want to try and find something in between. The terminology people are using is called long tail keywords. A keyword might be 'soccer'. Usually when people think keyword optimizing, they think of a primary keyword. The thing you want to target is slightly longer tail keywords. What I mean by longer tail is more than one word in your string of keywords. For example, 'soccer drill' is longer tail than 'soccer'. 'Soccer drill training' is longer tail than 'soccer drills'.

You don't want to go so long tail that no one is searching it, but you don't want to go so short that too many people are searching it. That's where you find the balance. Usually when I build a website, on the main home page I will try and go for something that is a little bit competitive. For example soccerdrill.net is medium competitive. 'Soccer drills' might be the search engine optimization keyword for the home page. Then on all the internal pages I might use another keyword, a different keyword with a slightly longer tail. Usually I'll go for the more competitive one at the top, then the less competitive ones I'll do on the internal pages. Then I'll start to rank for the internal ones. Then over time I might start to rank for the more competitive one. So I'll go for the longer tail stuff because it is easier and I'll get traffic straight away.

I might not get as much traffic as if I got 'soccer drills' but it is easier to do and it is a good way to jump start and kick start a website. So if we type 'soccer drills' into the search, let's look at some of the other keywords we've got. 'Soccer drill' in July has 5,400 people searching for it. A slightly longer tail keyword is 'youth soccer drill' and that has about 170 people searching. What I might do on one of the internal pages is use 'youth soccer dril'l. Another one is 'kid's soccer drill'. I might do that for another one.

Don't use too many search engine optimization keywords, just stick to one for each page. You could probably get away with doing 'soccer drill' and then 'youth soccer drills'. You could probably optimize for those two keywords. 'Soccer coaching' I wouldn't try to optimize. That would confuse the spider. The spider comes to this website and reads the title page, reads the meta description, keywords and h1 tag and reads the content on the website. If I've told it this page is about soccer drill, and it's also about soccer coaching and also about soccer balls, Google is going to scratch its head and say I don't know what this page is about.

You really want to go for one search engine optimization keyword and the reason is that you don't want to confuse Google. You can have slight variations and secondary keywords, because we have the primary keyword and the secondary as well. The main keyword is still referenced in that second keyword. That is the only time you might use multiple keywords. Typically you're only going to try and optimize for one search engine optimization keyword at any point in time.

SEO Liverpool is part of the UK SEO Network. Please also visit our sister sites SEO Services London and SEO Services Company [l]