Will Your Keywords Actually Work?

Selecting your search keywords is only the tip of the iceberg.  The next step is to determine how effective those keywords are going to be in driving targeted visitors to your web site.

In my opinion, performing all of the required analyzes is beyond the scope of most small business owners.  It is a time consuming task that is best left to the professionals.  This blog will touch on the concepts involved and refer you to a resource that is money well spent.

The first question you have to answer is how much competition is there for my keywords?  We can begin to answer that by taking a look at two different metrics on your competition's web sites:

1. Their link building efforts
2. Their web site optimization efforts

Fortunately Google provides us with a convenient way to measure the two metrics.

To get an idea of the competition's link building efforts, go to Google and type in the following inanchor:"your search keywords".  The results will tell you how many pages are being linked to using that exact search text.

Google also offers their PageRank analysis of a site's link popularity.  By installing the Google Toolbar into your Microsoft IE browser, each page that you visit will show its Google PageRank score from 0 to 10.  As a rule of thumb, scores of 4 and lower show very little link building, a score of 5 means some work has been done, and a score of 6 or higher indicates that the site has a lot of incoming links.

Pro Tip: You can use the Google Toolbar to help increase your link building efforts.  Go to the Home page of the top web sites for your main search keywords.  Click on the blue icon next to the PageRank score and select Backward Links.  The results will show you how many links are pointing to the web site and where they come from.  Use this information to contact those sites and ask to be linked to as well.

Google also helps us analyze the competition's efforts in optimizing their web pages for specific search keywords.  As we'll learn in my next post, the first place you want to place your keywords is in the HTML title tag.  By going to Google and typing intitle:"your search keywords", you will see approximately how many pages have your keywords in the page title.

Other factors that you need to analyze include the competition for Pay-Per-Click search terms (already covered in my Search Engines Explained (Part 3) post from last week), measuring keyword relevance, weighted popularity and Keyword Effectiveness Index.

Fortunately there is a resource available to everyone that will significantly help you in finding your search keywords and then analyze them for you.  Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs offers a service that will provide you with 5 valuable keyword reports for just under $100.  Click here to learn more about this service.

In the last part of my keyword series, I'll talk about the best places to put your keywords on your web pages and how to avoid spamming the search engines.