ABAKUS ist zertifiziert durch den BVDW und SEO Consultants Mitglied

Keyword research continued...

2. One of the best ways to get ideas for keywords, is to analyze your direct competitors pages. This doesn't mean you simply copy and paste your competitors keyword meta tags into your own site! Also be VERY careful not to use trademarked names.

You can best find your competition websites by searching with what you believe to be your own top two keywords in your favorite search engine and taking a look at the source code of the top 5 web sites in the results. Pay special attention to the contents of the title tag (<title>...</title>) and of course the keyword <meta name="keywords"... and description <meta name="description"... meta tags. These should help you get some keyword ideas. There is nothing unethical about researching your competitors websites. You can be sure they have done the same for their own site.

Successful companies know their competitors. Analyze your competitors websites in depth.

3. There are online resources that assist in the process of keyword research and selection. Generally through the use of large keyword databases holding the number of searches for any given term over a specific time frame. Normally a month or two worth of keywords. These databases can be very useful as they not only provide the number of searches but also help with synonyms and common keyword combinations relating to your specific theme. There is one particular company in the UK called Rivergold Associates Ltd. who offer a service called wordtracker. There are also other free keyword databases which are listed on my online tools page.

ABAKUS Internet Marketing has no affiliation with Wordtracker, but find it to be an excellent resource for english language keyword research and can recommend it.

There are some general guidelines to keyword selection that you should take note of. For web sites with lots of competition, it can normally be far more beneficial to optimize for two to three word combinations rather than single word terms. Especially if a site is new and has little so called off-page criteria such as inbound links. You will find you can get far more targeted traffic if you hone in on what exactly your web page is about. A good example for this would be if you had a real estate agency in say Michigan.
What you do not want to do is just focus your website solely on the keywords "real estate". You want to go for keywords which are honed in and very relevant to your site so in this case "real estate michigan" would be best. You could also take that a step further and optimize a sub page on your site for say "real estate detroit" or even "real estate detroit michigan". Now you are going to get targeted traffic and not a visitor from Nebraska looking for real estate locally. It is all about targeted traffic.

If however there is little competition, say less than 80,000 competing sites on a google search, you can then go for single term keywords regardless of your sites off page criteria (number of incoming links). Maybe that person in Nebraska wants to move out of state!

For highly competitive terms it is definitely best to consult a professional as to what keywords are best as they should have access to the subscription based databases and experience. This is an integrated phase of the search engine optimization service ABAKUS provide.

Plan for a maximum of only 3 keyword (phrases) per page.

Any more and you end up diluting the effect of any optimization for each of your keywords.

Now we have researched and chosen our best keywords, it is time to start thinking carefully about how and where to incorporate them in to your web pages. Thoughts and planning on your sites design should now be brewing. Design issues next...