Successful Website Promotion Part 1 - Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step towards optimizing your website and developing successful website promotion campaign.  It is actually a pre-step as the actual website promotion is the result of the content and presentation based on the keyword research. So how do we do this?

Brainstorming

Get a synonyms dictionary, your colleagues, family and brainstorm derivatives of your targeted business locations and services. Build a master list that would have two columns. 

Take each Location and combine with all the services.  Spreadsheet programs such as MS Excel or OpenOffice Spreadsheet have handy features to build those lists quickly.

Leave this list for a couple of hours to a day and get back to it. Look for more keywords on your competitor's websites, articles on similar subject by respectable authors as they are like to use synonyms and keyword combinations you haven't thought of.

Identify Niches

You have a great list of keywords that describe your business but you are not aware what search terms is your potential customer using to look online. Running your keywords  and removing the ones that people do not use to search is essential to bring more traffic to your website and convert to sales. Going after phrases that people don't search with is common mistake among businesses.

Here are the tools I use:

Wordtracker

Paid tool with a 7 day free trial period that uses a vast database of captured searches to show you how people search. Used by pretty much all web marketing professionals and business owners to research and find niches for their businesses to conquer. Wordtracker is easy because it detects plural out of single forms, has easy options to filter keywords and much more.

My favorite is the KEI which helps me identify markets to go after for my clients and to provide them reasonable frames of when "they will be on page 1". KEI calculates number of searches against pages online that compete for the search phrase. The higher KEI the better. Ideally we are looking for a search term with lots of searches and low competition and therefore higher KEI - how original :).

Such search terms rarely exist but we can concentrate on the easier ones with relatively high search volume and as the website builds authority to go after more competitive niches.

Wordtracker has good training materials, articles to read to and etc but I found that practice is the best mentor. Just play with it for a few days /its fun/ and ideas will start emerging - guaranteed.

For those that cannot afford the paid version now - there is a free plugin for Firefox called SEO Blogger that provides some of the features and is a good start. If you are serious about keyword research - you need the paid version - it rocks!

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

As a lot of the google stuff this is  a FREE tool that represents their database of searches / which is more than half of all traffic anyway/. To find it, google it and you can input search terms and get suggestions and monthly search volume. There is also competition tab but I am not looking at it as it represents adwords competition for pay per click campaigns rather than number of pages actually competing. 

www.seobook.com

This website provides a set of firefox extensions and a keyword tool based again on wordtracker and other sources that are a must have if you are running an online business. You need to register to download the firefox extensions where you also get advice on Search Engine Optimization from one of the best search gurus. I use their rank checker tool to check my present ranking on keywords to monitor progress and their keyword suggestion tool provides deeper keyword information.

You can also use Google Trends and Google Insight for Search for high traffic keywords if they apply to your business. I am deliberately not getting into details about the mentioned products as all of them are coming with great articles and videos to show you how to use them.

Having gone through the exhausting filtering phase of your keword research you are ready with your LIST! It is the traffic that you need to capture and the niches that you need to conquerer

Next post will explain some basic on-page on-website optimization or what is the first thing you need to do with your keyword list.