Optimize your Flash Website – The Importance of Keywords

Choosing the Perfect Keywords

As we stated in our last post, everything you do from an SEO perspective is based on your keywords. It’s essential that you identify the best keywords for your business because they’re the foundation of all the content, meta-tags, page-titles, descriptions, and anchor text you’ll use throughout your website. If you use the wrong keywords (or don’t use them at all) you won’t get the Organic traffic you need for your business to thrive.

To identify your key words, you need to think local. In this post we’ll be exploring strategies to develop a list of 20 strong keywords that will help you not just rise to the top of a Google search but to also attract visitors looking for what you have to offer.

For local websites, two of the most important optimization steps a marketer can take are incorporating local search phrases across Web pages and properly utilizing contact information throughout the site. - Patricia Hursh

What is a strong Keyword?

A strong keyword has two attributes. First, it defines what you’re offering in a way that many people use while searching for that product or service. Second, it has a low competition score. That is to say, fewer websites are using that keyword so the chances of you being ranked for it are higher. Search terms are used by Google to present relevant content to its users. Among other things, Google uses the keywords on your website to determine your site’s relevance to a particular search term (Keyword). Google and the other Search Engines filter your website according to your site’s relevance to a term, which in turn, determines your ranking. Remember, Google is focused on giving users content they can use so in very simplistic terms, if you make it easy for Google and they’ll make it easy for you.

As Harjot Kaleka’s writes in her article for twospot.com:

Keyword Research involves four important steps:

Discovery: Finding the right Keywords

There are many ways to come up with relevant keywords. You can (and should) make a list of your USPs (unique selling points) and benefits. You can ask your customers what terms they used to find you, and you should find out what terms the top competitors in your market use in the copy on their websites. When making your list of keywords, try to define what you do as narrowly as possible while maintaining relevance to your clients and customers.

If you work in more than one niche, you may want to think about adding additional websites so that you can focus your marketing techniques and not split the power of your keywords.

Be sure to use the language of your local area. For example, do people in your part of the world say senior pictures, photos, or portraits? This becomes particularly important when you incorporate locality. How do the people in the areas you service refer to the neighborhoods they live in? I lived in Chicago for some time and everyone called the city center “The Loop” It wasn’t the Chicago Metropolitan Area but “Chicago Land”. Be conscious of the local vernacular as you develop all your terms and content throughout your site. You’ll want to come up with between 10 and 20 terms to start.

Analysis: Using Keyword tools

Once you have your initial list, its time to plug them into a keyword tool. These tools have a number of uses but for this purpose they’ll show you terms you may not have thought of, terms used by your competition, and finally, will help you identify the strong from the weak. The first step is to grow your list. With Google’s free keyword tool, you can enter in any search term (or website) and Google will tell you exactly how many times that term is used as a search term per month and how competitive the term is. You can limit the tool to focus just on your selected terms or ask Google to suggest others.

With Semrush’s keyword tool, (about $20.00 a month) you can search any website and it will pull out all of the relevant keywords from that site. From there, you can click on any term and it will display how often the term is used and it will show the top 20 websites that are associated with that term. This is a great tool to check out what terms your competition is using and to verify your own sites performance. Word Tracker’s keyword tool is a bit deeper (and more expensive, about $50.00 a month) and is great for creating a matrix of key words and they have published a number of articles about Keyword Discovery on their site. Leah West has published an article on how to use this tool as well:

After generating as many keywords as you can, use these tools to help identify high yield terms with a low competition value. This is your short list. I would suggest using both tools so you can triangulate your results (every tool gives you slightly different information) for a minimum of 6 months ($420.00). You’ll need to periodically verify the results of your labor and tweak as necessary. There’s one other tool I should mention here. The Advanced Web Ranking tool ($199-$600) has so many uses I cannot possibly discuss them all here but it allows you to preform a very deep cross analysis of a number of terms or companies on a single platform.

Selection: The Importance of Niche + Locality

Once you have your short list, it’s time to focus it by combining those terms that most reflect what you do with your local information.

A business’ address and phone number are instrumental for conducting business locally. But this contact information also provides a critical clue to search engines that a business is local in nature. - Patricia Hursh

Let’s say you are a wedding photographer. If you search “photographer” Google brings up 53.7 million listings. Now search “wedding photographer”. You’ll find there are about 36.7 million listings and people use that term about 450,000 times world wide to find a photographer to take pictures of their weddings every month. Needless to say, it’s still a very competitive term and it’s highly unlikely you’ll get on page 50 let alone page one. But do you really need brides in foreign countries looking at your website? Let’s see what happens when we add “Seattle” to that search. The field of listings is narrowly reduced to 21.5 million listings but more importantly the searches are down to 2,400 and while still competitive, it is a far less a universal term. You’ll also notice is that by adding a locality, the first entry is now Google maps. We’ll discuss maps and directories in later posts, but you see that 10 companies have basically come up as the first search term of this search. You will also notice that all the websites on the first page have their area in their title of their home page. Search “anycity wedding photographer(s)” and you will notice the same pattern.

The work now is to get your list down to about 20 great terms that you can combine with your address, city, neighborhood, phone number, and other terms that help define your business’ local foot print.

In our next article we will discus how and where you can add this information to your website. Until then, happy hunting. Stay organized as it’s a laborious process, but is definitely worth the effort and can be a lot of fun.

Additional Reading:

Importance of Keywords Wrong Keywords Means No Traffic, by Leah West

Importance of Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization by Harjot Kaleka

Keyword Discovery 101, Part 1 by Ron Jones