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Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines Part 1 - Keyword Research

January 13, 2011

When it comes to search engine optimization, some web design companies leave you high and dry after they've completed your website design. If this is the case you can call us anytime for help (1-866-318-1932) or follow some basic principles I outline here. Let's start by optimizing your homepage first as it will be the first page that the engines see and should contain your most sought after keywords.

1. Start with some keyword research:

What keywords are users going to type into search engines to find your website? If you know just couple keywords then you can input them into a great tool from Google to help give you other options. The Google Keyword Tool can be found here - https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Try different combinations of words and see how much traffic they are producing. Once you've identified a group of keywords that fit your business you can then organize them into priorities. Here's a simple example for a local plumber in the Windsor Ontario area. Please pay attention to the use of the local area in the keywords.

The client would like to come up when someone searches for "Plumbing Windsor". So let's plug that into Google's keyword tool and see what we get. Here's the results:

plumbing windsor - 140 Local Searches/Month
plumber windsor - 260 Local Searches/Month
plumbers windsor - 58 Local Searches/Month
plumbers in windsor - 58 Local Searches/Month

First off, the keywords the client wants has some traffic, so that's good. If your ideal keyword has no traffic then find one from your research that does. No sense in optimizing a webpage for a keyword set that get's no traffic right? It's important to note that there were several other keywords that came up but they didn't have the local keyword "Windsor" in them and therefore are not totally relevant (broader keywords like "plumbing" should be used by national advertisers).

What we did find out from this list is that actually "plumber windsor" gets a bit more traffic than "plumbing windsor" so we should keep that in mind when we create our priority keyword list. Here's how the priority keyword list should look based on traffic:

plumber windsor
plumbing windsor
plumbers windsor
plumbers in windsor

This priority list will help us in the next step to create a search engine friendly advertisement for the search engines.  Click Here to move on to part 2 of the article series.