SEO pt.I: Choosing keywords

July 23, 2009 – 10:02 am, by Irene @ Skalfa

Posted in Marketing | Tags: choosing keywords · dating software · SEO

After you have chosen the right dating software for creating a community site, thought of a good site conception, obtained a relevant domain name and design, the next crucial question is ‘How do I make people know about my network?’. The obvious answer is ‘through search engines!’. You will hear nothing new if I say that your online project success strongly depends on its position in search results. Top positions promise you thousands of members, loads of advertisers and sizable income. So you should do your best to help your site become search-engine-friendly by addressing tools and methods of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO – is the process of attracting a flow of traffic to your website from search engines based on their principles of work and on what people mostly tend to look for. The first and most important step in this compound process is choosing the right keywords for your site to be found on the web.

Think like a customer. ‘Keywords’ is what a user types in the search field hoping to find a relevant match to his expectations in search results. So, to start the suitable keywords ‘exploration’ from the right point, put yourself in your potential customer’ shoes. The question to ask is ”what words or word combinations would I use looking for an online community like mine?”. Looking for an answer, don’t forget to consider the opinion of your friends and colleagues – ask as many people as possible. Recall the words or phrases you used searching for your competitors on the web. Take into account the geographical language peculiarities (the British will definitely use the word ‘flat’ referring to mortgage instead of the traditional American ‘apartment’). Analyze the list of suggestions you’ll get. It makes sense to use keyword combinations (phrases) besides single keywords, as normally people can’t express what they look for in just one word. But keep in mind that a keyword phrase should not contain more than 3-5 main words.

Useful tip: Making a keywords list, take into account common misspellings too, especially when it comes to words with difficult orthography.

Quantity or quality? After making a list of words and word combinations referring to your site conception, ‘examine’ them on search engines: type a word combination (say, ‘dating site’) and see how many results you get. Millions. Well, you have found the popular keyword combination… and tones of competitors as a ‘makeweight’. Check out the top 10 sites appearing in search results. I bet they have hundreds of pages and most likely thousands of incoming links. This means that winning top positions from these sites will require not less than those hundreds of pages developed and thousands of links acquired by you. If you are just starting your online dating business, remember that it’s ‘better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion’, so we advise to begin with more specific keywords rather than broad ones. Specific keywords will attract fewer visitors to your site, no doubts. But at the same time they will give you significantly more chances to reach top positions in search results. Another advantage of such ’specification’ is that it will more likely bring you visitors belonging to your target audience as compared to fairly competitive broad keywords attracting a number of ‘occasional guests’. So using, for instance, a ‘pet lovers dating site’ (as opposed to a ‘dating site’) keyword combination dramatically cuts down competition and increases chances to involve some really interested potential members into your online community.

Useful tip: If you are offering goods or services for some specific region, be sure to include your location to the keywords list. This will dramatically increase your competitiveness on the targeted market.

More inspiration sources. The keywords choosing strategy based only on your own thoughts and anticipation may be quite not bad, but this is surely not sufficient for a solid-foundation SEO. In order to have a more or less detailed vision of what traffic result to expect from the keywords selected by you, and to get more ideas for choosing new keywords based on some facts and statistics you will need to refer to keyword research tools. Here are just some of them, but you can always find more on the web:

Google Keyword Tool was actually developed for Google AdWords subscibers, but you can still use it for getting a free list of keywords matching your site idea with indication of search volumes.

WordTracker allows you to make a more detailed research of your keywords. For example, it can check a certain keyword’s popularity (how many times it appeared in more than 30 million search queries) and can even generate a report on maximum total predicted traffic for different search engines. Beware though, that data supplied by this resource may not always be 100% true and it is meant to give you a general view only.

Go for keyword density checkers too. They will help you analyze the ‘keyword cloud’ (visual depiction of keywords used on a website) and keywords density, which should be about 5-10%, according to common sense.

Apart from the Internet sources mentioned above, you can do the following:

Check the server log files. The information on the words used by visitors to find your site through search engines is stored in your server log files. It can be helpful for you to determine the main keywords and key phrases to target, and will probably give you inspiration for new ideas.

One more useful practice is checking what keywords were used by your competitors. For that you need to go to your rival’s site page and right-click on it, then choose the ‘view page source’ option. It will show the page in HTML format. Now you just need to find the ‘keywords’ string. Remember that you are not doing this for copying (plagiarizing) your competitor’s keywords list (if the keywords are trademarked – you could be penalized), but for learning how to choose and set them up right.

My final advice is – use only those keywords that reflect the true content of your site. Inserting simply most searched keywords and phrases may be tempting, but this will most likely lead you to being banned by search engines.

That was the basic information needed for choosing the right keywords for your site. But this is just the first step. In further posts you will find tips on how to optimize your site content, what practices to avoid, where to submit your site for search engines indexation and many more useful things.

I look forward to reading your comments!

Best wishes,
Irene