Be Found.   Be Seen.  Be Noted.

Picking the right keywords for your site...

The first phase of a successful search engine optimization campaign is the keyword discovery and selection phase. Often enough, the vocabulary used by a website is not quite the same as the vocabulary used by prospective visitors. Imagine your site discusses "mayonnaise" – ordinary users searching for “mayo” will not find it. The following graph describes the relationship between your website's vocabulary and the search engine users' vocabulary:

The goal of the keyword discovery and selection phase is to make the middle zone as large as possible. In order to do this, we have to find out what users search for, and modify the site accordingly.

The keyword discovery phase

Discovering the appropriate keywords for your site can be done using several sources of information:

• Domain analysis – listing words specific to your activity, to your domain, to your geographical location, etc. The key here is to think like an average user, not like an expert. If you’re selling flowers, “arrangement” is better than “bouquet”.
• Search log analysis – if there is a search function on your site, its logs reveal scores about what your visitors are looking for on your site.
• Web referral logs analysis – these logs reveal what keywords visitors used to find your site on search engines (of course this usually means that you already have these keywords, but they may need more emphasis on your site).
• Competition analysis – review the successful competition, and assess what vocabulary they use.

Once a set of potential target keywords is established, we use specialized tools that indicate the popularity of any keyword or key-phrase. Selecting the right target keywords is a balancing act between picking generic keywords (that many users search for, but that will have lots of competition), and specific keywords (that less users search for, but that will have less competition). For larger sites, many specific keywords can be targeted. Here are some examples of generic/specific compromises:

• Don’t target “Lord of the Rings”, but target “Lord of the Rings posters”, “Lord of the Rings DVDs”, “Lord of the Rings merchandise”…
• Don’t target “chocolate”, but target “gourmet chocolate delivery”, “fine chocolate delivery”, “chocolate delivery Toronto”, “chocolate delivery Canada”, etc.

Note that keywords may be assigned to the entire site (these keywords would be present on all or most pages, and describe your website as a whole), or to any given page (to describe the specific topic covered by these pages).