RULE #1: Search engine optimisations are pointless if you are using keywords that nobody is searching on.
OK. now that we've stated the obvious, how do you ensure that the search engine keyword strategy that your whole plan is based on is, in fact, in line with the search habits of your target market?
Think Like An Internet Surfer
Use your own searching habits as a guide to what everybody else is doing. If you go to a search engine and type in a general enquiry like "cairns accommodation" and are then confronted with "Results 1-10 of 176,983 page found", what do you do? You casually browse through the first page or 3 of results then refine your query to what you're really looking for - "trinity beach holiday apartment" - and start seriously investigating the results.
The most obvious search terms are the ones that everybody else is fighting to get into the top 100 results for, and they aren't where your potential customers are doing most of their research. Why waste all that time and effort squabbling for a hotly contested set of keywords, when you could be placing yourself on the first page of results for what your potential customers are REALLY looking for.
Regional Variants
Depending on who you are trying to attract to your site, regional variations in spelling and vocabulary are critical.
Take the difference between European and US tourists for example. Are you looking for people who want a "holiday" or a "vacation"? Do they want an "apartment" or a "condominium"? Can you offer them "accommodation" or "lodgings"? Are they "travellers" or "travelers"?
The easy answer is to use all of them, but the more keywords you use, the lower the relative importance of each one as far as the search engines are concerned. If you focus your keyword strategy around 10-15 specific keywords you will avoid diluting them and putting at risk rankings based on keyword density and frequency.
And then there's common spelling mistakes:
Everybody makes mistakes but if they are common ones they can be capitalised on by building them into your keywords.
Product Perception
Your customers may have a different perception to yours with regards to exactly what it is you're selling. You like to call your property a "beachfront villa" but in the eyes of the consumer you have a "family beach house". What's our point? People actually looking for a beachfront villa will find your site and decide it's not what they want, and potential guests searching for a family beach house won't find you because you haven't established a search engine profile using these keywords.
Be realistic about how you describe your product, and use the terms that you know your customers use to describe whatever it is your selling.
Keyword Research
Understanding how your potential customers may be searching for you is important, and one of the best places to start is GoTo.com, which gives you the ability to look up how popular a search term is. It provides a list of related searches that include your term and how many times that term was searched on during the previous month.
Another opportunity for keyword research is available on the AltaVista search results pages. When the results page appears it will also show related searches just under the search box. These are among the most popular terms that contain the orginal search term.
A few points to note:
- Read down then across to the next column, to see them in order of popularity
- Some of the related search terms may be shown with capitalization. This does not mean that people are searching using exactly that capitalization. It merely shows the most common capitalization that AltaVista finds for that term on web pages themselves. There's no need to target the exact capitalization displayed.
- Plurals and singular useage of your search term are combined
- Only general search strings will return related search results
Other online tools will also help with your keyword decisions:
- Lexical FreeNet: Type in a word, and this free service will generate a drill down list of synonyms. You can even try "sounds like."
How Can We Help?
Confused yet? Unfortunately what you've just read is only part of the story, and then there's the task of getting the keywords in the right order, and in the right places within the coding of your site, so that they have maximum impact. This is called keyword optimisation and involves correctly structuring your site's META tags.
The details above are the preliminary steps! There are other important aspects of keyword research that have helped us build and support some of the most successful sites in North Queensland. We have the experience and the track record in search engine profile management, so please visit our services page for more information about how we can help you in your battle for search engine visibility.
