Internet Marketing | SEO | Traffic and Tips

by: Rahman Mehraby

Keyword Discovery or Keyphrase Research is of high importance in the success of any website. Internet searchers use keywords and key phrases to find what they want.

If your website uses such key elements in a proper way, they could lead you to a successful online business. If not, your site needs a serious reconsideration.

Importance of Keyword Research in Web Development

The choice of keywords is so important that experts recommend web developers to consider keyword discovery search as the initial step in their works. That is to say, even before choosing a name for your website, you need to know what your keywords will be.

After keyword and key phrase research, web developers can proceed to choose a name for their site. Texts, links, web design, meta data, all tags, comments and whatever in which words play some part will be done afterward based on the initial keyword discovery.

Which Keywords OR Keyphrases to Choose?

You should do some keyword discovery or keyphrase research to learn what people type while thinking about your information, product or service. Then, get the historical volume of a keyword that is searched and see how competitive it is.

Of course, if a keyword is searched a lot, it wouldn't mean that it's the best one for you. Actually, the competition for such a term will be way high too.

So, what's the solution? You should choose the most effective one. Divide the popularity of a keyword (the number of searches for it) by its competitiveness (the number of results) and you'll have the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) of that keyword.

The higher the result, the better that keyword will be to choose and use.

How Many Keywords / Keyphrases Do You Need?

When you begin your keyword discovery, you should make a list of keywords and keyphrases. The most effective ones, one to three of them, will be your main keywords or keyphrases used at your main page, usually home page.

The total number of keywords for your website will depend on the size of your whole site, the content of each individual page, etc.

Generally, the number of keywords or key phrases for each page should be from 3 to 10. However, it's usually recommended not to begin your new page or main page of the new site with more than 3 keyphrases.

Keywords vs Keyphrases?

While searching, if you use a single keyword, you are searching for general information, product or service which is usually a brand name these days. The longer the string of words in a keyword cluster, the more specific such a keyphrase is. Success is in selecting your best keyphrases, not keywords.

An example:

You run a foodstuff recipe website and now want to be found for a particular salad for a special event, Easter. Let's say you use Google for this search. Would you use "salad" as your main keyword?

I guess not, because you know that this term could bring you around 40 millions of results. It means a lot of competition.

What about "Easter salad"? it definitely lowers the degree of competition for you as there will be around 1.2 million results. Great difference, isn't it? This, by itself, shows how different it is to add one more word to the search term.

To narrow the search, I even recommend to use one more word to the string. It will be "Easter salad recipes".

Maybe the difference in results won't be very different from "Easter salad", but when Internet searchers use this last string of keywords (a keyphrase), they are more specific about what they need.

Important: If you write rich content on "salad recipes for Easter" and optimize a webpage for it, you will most probably be seen on the first page of the results.

How to Use Keywords or Keyphrase in Writing?

First things first. Your attitude is the most important thing. Write for your webpage visitors. Give them exactly the information related to the keyphrase you're using. Then, at second stage consider the search engine and their rules.

Obviously, now that you've done keyphrase research, you're supposed to make use of the result, in our example, "Easter salad recipes".

Use it at your title, body text, meta data, alt tags, etc in a natural way. Again, while doing this, avoid stuffing your page with this key phrase. Keep the keyword frequency, weight, etc in its appropriate proportion.

Don't forget to use some synonymous terms. Google considers synonyms used at the same page by its algorithm.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should sacrifice your keyphrase research by providing a large number of synonymous words or phrases for it. Just consider it a few times.

How to Create Successful Web Pages?

Considering keyword discovery or keyphrase research suggested above, the right way to create successful web pages could be as follows:

1. Launch a thorough keyword discovery or keyphrase research.

2. Apply web copy writing techniques to create rich content for your pages.

3. Finally, optimize your web page to make sure your keyword discovery or keyphrase research hasn't been done in vain.

Eventually, you'll have one such a good web page. Do the same for all other pages of your site and you'll see the result overtime.