Choosing your keywords is a massive part of the whole SEO and online presence experience, but the same old question as to how to choose them effectively still gets asked on a regular basis.

Keywords are still very, very important to search engines, and even if they now have a little less impact on ranking, they are still a vital part of your website and something you must get right. A few of the older search engines used to rely on meta keyword tags and nothing else, but as the engines are now more advanced they do not generally just focus on this, but they do use your keywords in many different ways.

Keywords are used in your Title tags, description tags and your keyword tags, but they are also used throughout all of your content, links and many other factors. So, it is so important that you get this right, or at least you start on the right road forward as the keywords can be tweaked throughout the life of your website.

The main question we tend to get asked about keywords is how to choose them and what do we base our suggestions on. Although we use a variety of methods, the two basic methods, and arguably the most efficient, is to look at what your competitors are doing and to use a couple of the keyword tools currently on the internet.

Any company, website, product or service can benefit from making sure they are using the correct keywords on their website. It is quite usual to see websites where webmasters have failed to complete their tags or have just not really given a thought to the keywords they should use, but don't forget, visitors find your website through keywords, so it can never be overlooked.

Keyword Tools

There are a few keyword tools on the internet, with our favourites being the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and the paid version of Word Tracker (http://www.wordtracker.com).

For example, if you were selling property investments, you would type property investment into one of these keyword research tools. You would then be given a list of the keywords and the search volumes for each of them. Whereas it would take you a long time to rank top of Google for Property Investment, you can use the produced list to look for long tail alternatives and therefore focus on them.

Competitor Research

A good way of finding out about keywords, you could and possibly should be using is to take a look at what your competitors are doing. Simply choose a keyword, type it into Google and make a spreadsheet of your competitors and the Title, Description and Keywords they use in their tags. I would recommend doing this for the first ten results, or the first ten most relevant results if you only want to feature your competitors and not necessarily any website that is ranking.

If you do this for the top ten, you can then see straight away all of the keywords they are using, and you can then use this help plan your keywords, but do not copy them or simply duplicate them, use the information to try and capture the same search terms but mix in some of your own and use your own unique combinations.

The Next Steps

Once you have your data from the Keyword research tools and your competitor research, you can then begin to plan your keywords. As previously mentioned, you do not have to just focus on your main keyword. Use the research to pick out smaller, long tail keywords that are less competitive.

By doing this you might be appealing to less searchers, but you have more of a chance of ranking highly for the search term.

In my opinion, its better to come on the first page for a search term that might get 2,000 searches a month than page 20 for something that gets 20,000. All of the research you carry out will allow you to start aiming for some of the lesser searched keywords, whilst still making sure you are focusing on your main keywords, which will just take longer to get high rankings in Google for, if they are very, very popular and competitive.

You will then use your keywords for your meta tags, your content, page names, alt tags and linking campaigns, so it really does prove that the work you do now will be able to benefit many of your SEO challenges, meaning that keyword research is something you not only have to do, you have to do it from day one, even before you have launched your website.

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