Keyword Strategy

An intrduction about keywords and how they fit into your SEO strategy.

SEO Keyword Strategies

  • Target keywords with medium search popularity. If you build a good overall site and put up a good amount of content there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to have decent rankings for some medium-volume keywords. These keywords will be the main driver of your SEO-related growth and if you don't plan to pay for advertising it will probably be your only driver of traffic growth.

  • Target keywords with low search popularity. From a planning perspective, a problem arises because you won't know how well you will rank for a particular keyword until after you try because you won't actually know how good your ranking will be. This is in addition to the fact that some words which appear to be low popularity search terms bring in good traffic. One thing I learned about SEO strategy is that I have gotten a lot of traffic from terms that I didn't think would bring in traffic.

  • Ignore impossible keywords. When it comes to choosing keywords, don't try to hit home runs. If you do that then you'll strike out. Try to hit a lot of singles and doubles. If you do this then you will get good traffic.

  • Look for under-represented keywords Even though there are webmasters who do a top-down strategy for creating content by checking what keywords, and therefore what topics, are popular, most webmasters create content from a bottom up perspective. By this, I mean that they don't look at the web to see what the content needs of users are, they simply create whatever content interests them. But by looking at content opportunities you can find unmet needs to exploit.

    Looking at opportunities from a top-down, macro-viewpoint and seeing if there are any areas of unmet demand is not a new concept. After all, this is the basis for business success in general. But when it comes to using this strategy within a particular niche most webmasters ignore it. For example, most webmasters will start up a web site with the idea that the particular niche is popular and growing. So they make a good strategic business decision to analyze the opportunities and act on them. But when they put up a site they put up cookie-cutter content that is no different than other sites'. The online poker content sites are a good example of this. Back in 2003 and 2004 tons of beginning and intermediate webmasters made a good decision to enter the area and put up websites. But most of the web sites looked the same. They have the typical reviews of all the sites (Party Poker, Pokerstars, etc), the standard poker odds charts, some obvious and rudimentary tutorials on hold 'em but nothing original. Looking at unmet content needs would have given them an SEO competitive advantage over their rivals.

  • Targeted keywords Another thing to remember is that you want your keywords to be very "targeted". This means you want them to be as specific as possible. Most webmasters don't realize that many Google users will do a search for a very generic word and without even clicking on sites will realize that their search is too generic so they will then do a more targeted search. Or, if they do come to one of the sites in the search, they'll look at it for 10 seconds and leave because it isn't exactly what they were looking for. So even if you can get decent traffic for generic, popular keywords the quality of traffic will be low.

  • Diversify your keywords Don't look at 1 or 2 keywords being the magic keywords that will grow your site. You should be looking at 50 to 100 or a few hundred, if possible. This involves creating tons of content which should be a core strategy of your website anyway so your keyword and content strategies should be re-enforcing each other.


 
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