If you remeber from last time "search engines looks for consistency and relevancy in a number of different areas of your in-page content and referral links". Let's start at the top and talk about keywords themselves, as these will be the important building blocks of your SEO tactics.

Keywords explained
Keywords are the words or phrases that you want people to be able to find you under when they do a search on the internet. These are essentially the words or phrases that best describe your business and the things that people would think of when they are interested in your goods or services. The more specific the word or phrase to what you offer, the more likely it will be to drive people to your site.

Let's take my example company 'Joe's London Taxis' and see how it works. For this fictional business, there are a number of keywords we could try. For each below I've indicated how many terms are returned by google.com as an example of their competitiveness. Here are some terms I could use;

  • business (1.4 billion results on Google)
  • car (652 million)
  • london (402 million)
  • taxi (97 million)

Hmm, these don't seem too good. The sheer volume of pages returned on these terms will make it very hard to ever have an impact for my little business. How about;

  • london taxi (2.7 million)
  • west london taxi (1.6 million)
  • hammersmith taxi (221,000)
  • london minicab (220,000)
  • west london minicab (96,000)
  • hammersmith minicab (24,500)

That's getting a bit better. Using the 2 or 3 word phrases improves your chances of ranking highly as these phrases attract fewer competing companies and can be more specific to your market. And it looks like 'minicab' is a much less competitive word than 'taxi', i.e. there is a greater chance I can score highly with 'minicab' as fewer companies compete for this word. This will all help me make my choices about which keyword phrases I should use for my site.

As the competitiveness of the search falls, so will the number of searches, so it's always a balance between being on page 100 for a top phrase with millions of searches or being on page 1 for a less used phrase with only a few thousand. Personally I think higher up and more focused is better.

How many should you use? Well that's debatable too. Most articles suggest less is more, as few as 5 keyword phrases per page as a target, e.g. "london taxi, west london taxi, west london minicab, london airport taxi, hammersmith taxi" is 5 keyword phrases (usually seperated by a comma). Most keyword optimisers won't complain until you have more than 15-20. So somewhere in the range 5-20 won't hurt. I'll choose 15 for my example site.

If you have an exciting or unique brand name then this should be included in your keywords (and probably your URL too).

And remember, your keywords will need to vary from page to page reflecting the contents of that page. There can be some overlap, but you can take different page contents as an opportunity to expand your list of keywords. For example, for my page www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking I'll want to choose words relating to booking, e.g. "book a london taxi, london taxi booking, etc."

It's best to plan your keywords for each of your pages, and only then can you start to go through the pages themselves and make sure the keywords are correctly represented and consistent in the right places.

So there's your first piece of homework, work out your keywords for your different pages. Don't worry about getting it 'right' first time. These are things you can change as you go, but try to think about the important, specific phrases for the contents of each of your pages.

Next time we'll see how to use them in your pages.

Next Article in Series: SiteMaker and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Part III