It is important to have keywords in the content of website to improve the search engine rankings. Keywords help the visitors to find the site and if you select wrong keywords, your site is down south in the pile of websites. Wrong keywords don’t fetch relevant traffic although your site’s search engine ranking is good. Most important thing in SEO is to identify your target audience and keywords that can bring this niche audience to your site. The important steps in Keyword Research are discovering keywords, analyzing the keywords, selection of keywords and arrangement and use of keywords within your site’s content.
1: Discovering keywords – This phase is to identify as many keywords that are related to your website as well as the visitors. You will get better results if you have wider keyword coverage. To expand the initial list of keywords you can use keyword research tools such as wordtracker. It will help you to find a number of searches on a particular word and also the terms associated to your search term.
2: Analyzing the keywords – This step helps you to analyze the competition for the search terms that gives an idea of number of pages competing for the topspot. Due to the complex nature of the search engine algorithms non-optimized sites also have high ranks most often, because it should be understood that ranking depends on several factors and Page Rank is important in the analysis of keywords.
3: Selection of keywords – After the first and second steps, you will have about 50-100 keyword phrases which are highly qualified and they describe your website qualities. Normally, general keywords are searched more by the visitors, but it often brings average traffic to the site. Focused keywords bring traffic to the site as well as better search engine ranking. Among the short listed keywords from the 100 odd keywords, select the keywords that will offer ranking and competitiveness. Final selection of keywords is by eliminating those that are difficult to fetch any rank and also by eliminating the keywords with low popularity.
4: Arrangement of keywords – Use the keywords that are sorted out on different parts of the website and the keywords should not be used on all pages of the websites. Divide the keywords in to 5-7 groups to use them in a good way and each group should have closely related keywords that give rise to themes. Use the short tailed and long tailed keywords in a good mixture. Various sections of the website that are closely related with the keyword group should be identified and arrange the pages of the website using these themes.
Finally, see that the keywords are optimized in the content of all web pages, and then you are there right on top of search engines when a keyword is entered by a user for his/her search.