SEO & Keyword Selection

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

Introduction

"Keyword Selection" refers to which keywords you will choose to get your site to come up in searches. The process involved is easy - you pick keywords and optimize your pages for those keywords. But actual success is a lot harder than that because every other webmaster is doing the same thing. In short, the valuable keyword are too competitive to get a good anking on, and the less competitive words don't result in much traffic.

Keyword Selection

When a web site needs to be optimized for high rankings, the first step is to find the keywords most relevant to each page on the site. You can do this as you finish writing each page or you can do write all your keywords at once when your site is done. You want to find the keyword or phrase that best fits the content on that page and optimize the page using the different SEO techniques.

Many webmasters who embark on an SEO campaign for their site but still have trouble driving traffic to their site. This is because they haven't optimized their site for the "best" keyword. By the "best" keyword, I'm referring to the word that will give you the most traffic. The keyword that gets you the most traffic will be the one that has the right mix of popularity and ranking.

Ranking means how high you rank for a keyword in the search results. The benefit of rankings tend to go up exponentially as you get closer to the top of searches because the most users clicks on the first few results way more often than they click on the results further down the page. Popularity is the total number of searches for that keyword. Popularity can roughly be categorized as high-volume, medium-volume, and low-volume.

Keywords and Traffic

The goal with SEO is to find the keywords that will give you the highest number of clicks. The popular keywords (like "poker", or "sex") will usually get you few clicks because your ranking will probably be very bad for those terms because they are so competitive. Low-volume keywords are much easier to get a high ranking on but the number of searches for them is low. Medium-volume keywords seem to be the sweet spot for SEO. With those, there are a decent number of searches for them and you can still get a medium or high ranking for them.

So the keywords that will give you the highest number of clicks will be the ones that have the optimal combination of search popularity and ranking. A good theoretical framework to use is to rank each factor (popularity and ranking) on a scale of 1 to 10. Then look at whichever is the weakest of the factors and that will be the amount of traffic. Keep in mind this is a theoretical guide and the numbers used here are used as guides.

Here is an example of how you could estimate keyword popularity. A very popular keyword (e.g. "sex"") would be a 10, an above-average keyword (e.g. "sex tape") might be a 6 or 7, a below-average keyword (e.g. "sex tape laws") might be a 3 or 4, and a low-popularity keyword (e.g. "sex tape laws in Florida") would be a 1. Working within this theoretical framework, the first thing you will want to realize is that certain Traffic Scores will be out of your reach. The keywords with a popularity of 7 to 10 will bring in tons of traffic but, in my opinion, the average webmaster won't rank high enouh to get anything from them.

Here is an example of ranking popularity. Ranking first would be a 10, ranking second would be a 7, ranking third would be a 5, ranking elsewhere in the top 10 would be a 3, and ranking below the top 10 would be a 1.

To estimate how much traffic you would get from a keyword look at the weakest score for each factor. A keyword ranked as a 10 but with a ranking score of 1 would bring in no traffic. Similarly, a keyword with a opularity score of 1 but a ranking score of 10 would also bring in little traffic. In both of those cases, the lowest score is a 1. In my experience, the most traffic will come from 2 kinds of keywords. First, are the keywords that have a popularity of 6 or 7 where you rank around 3 to 5 (these are populaity 2-word phrases which you ranking in the top 10 on Google). The second group are keywords that have a popularity score of 4 or 5 but your ranking has a score of 10 (these are probably going to be 3-word phrases that you rank first for).

With all that said, keep in mind that your keywords will be dictated by your content and your content choices should be driven by a logical layout of your subject matter. Your content outline should generally be based on your readers needs and not driven by a list of keywords. But there is nothing wrong with brainstorming for keywords and writing some content specifically because you think those keywords will bring some SEO. You just need to be able to integrate that keyword-inspired content into the site in a way that it doesn't distort the content structure of your site.


 
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