Get the Right Keywords for Your Website

The number one thing I have seen in my IT career is that SEO firms choose the right keywords for clients. You should also get the right keywords for your website. Getting a good marriage of keywords involves finding a niche that you can use to market yourself. Here is what I mean.

SEO Firms Can Find a Niche
Choosing the right keywords does not necessarily mean that you should pick the most obvious keywords for the mission of your website. Far too often, very large companies with milliion dollar SEO budgets have already locked down their #1 position on an organic search for that term. Most likely, they also have PPC advertising in the same area.



Billboard.com has a Google PR Rating of 6. Digital Dream Door has a good PR of 4. And Info Please has a PR rating of 5. Their Alexa ratings will yield a simmilar picture. You will not be able to compete for this space for years. Your keyword of “rock songs” needs some help. A better choice might be “good rock songs.” This keyword still gets 4400 global search a month, but has almost no competition. This set of keywords could easily yield you a spot on the top 10 search list. As of today, some yahoo answer posts are about all you get. This would give a new person a chance to compete.

Let’s say you sell rock songs for a living. Your stuff. You want to build a website to sell your songs. After some thought, you decide that “rock songs” would be a good keyword for you to use to help people find your website. It’s simple, and to the point. You fill your website with this keyword, in strategic locations (domain name, title of website, header tags, website content, etc.) And still no one comes.

Here is sad truth. Let’s take a look at an exact keyword search for rock songs. (that’s what the paranthesis do for the search). Here are the top 3 companies that appear on the Google search:

I used the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to help me find my term. You might ask, “why would Google provide such a great keyword tool?” That’s easy, it’s a great way for them to expand the search engine market, and potentially provide new ground for PPC ads.

When getting started, I would recommend not to use more then 5 keyword terms for your site. In all reality, it will be hard to track on even 3, but the other keywords add clout over time. When using the Google Keyword tool, use the “exact match” option so you know how many people are searching for your market by that same exact set of words. The rule of thumb for building a new niche market would have you looking for keywords with little competition, that yield 5000 monthly global searches or less. This would be even better is you could get that in your local market (some of you may not be ready to market globally.) Those keywords will have enough search bang to be profitable, but not so many that the competition will blow you out of the water from the gitgo

SEO firms choose the right keywords. You should get the right keywords for your website too. Now, you just need to get busy with the Google Keyword Search tool and do some research.

Cheers, Johnny