Choosing good Keyphrases

Yes, good keyphrases, not keywords. Trying to get ranked in search engines for a single keyword is just about impossible for the average webmaster and would be a big task for an experienced SEO specialist. You need groups of keywords to form keyphrases.

Choosing the relevant keyphrases that best describe your website products and/or services, and are most likely to convert to sales or leads, is the single most important stage of optimising your website. Before you do anything you need to get this right, as pretty much any future optimisation work stems from these choices. We often recommend a client uses pay-per-click advertising in the short-medium term to gauge which phrases perform the best in terms of conversion. Using the data gleaned from the PPC campaign allows you t make more informed choices on what phrases to target for SEO.

Logically group your keyphrases

Once you have identified your list of keyphrases you should then group these logically. Each group will constitute a page you need to write to target those phrases. For very competitive phrases you should make groups of 1 or 2 keyphrases, for less competitive terms between 3-6 keyphrases.

Example Keyphrase Grouping

Say I identify the following search phrases relevant to my website:

1. website design
2. website design UK
3. website designers
4. professional website designers

These are very competitive terms, so I should target no more than 1-2 per page of content, however for this example I will group all 4 into one phrase that targets the lot:

Website design by UK professional website designers

This combined phrase targets all 4, although the term website design UK is a little diluted by having the by inserted prior to the UK.

Writing Optimised Content

This combined phrase now forms my page title and my heading 1 on my page. Within the page I will also write a cuple of paragraphs of content for each phrase in turn and give each paragraph a level 2 heading using the phrase, eg:

Website design by UK professional website designers [h1 heading]
[paragraph of text to introduce the page]
Website design [h2 heading]
[several paragraphs of text about website design]
Website design UK [h2 heading]
[several paragraphs of text about website design UK]
et. al.

There you have it - choosing good keyphrases and logially grouping them into pages is all part of planning a successful website for SEO.

Keyphrase suggestion tools and resources

Google adwords tool

Wordtracker

Overture

www.themezoom.com

www.acomputerportal.com/keywords.html

Marketleap: Keyword Position checker.

SEO Chat is a resource for web professionals and has a large inventory of SEO tools available.

Digital Point: Some useful tools keyword suggestion tool