3rd
Keyword Strategies
The beginning of your SEO journey is to analyze which keywords you want your website to appear under. If you get this wrong you’re in trouble. If you do it right your further optimization will fall into place easily.
Start by asking what your site is about. A common mistake is to pick something too general as the keyword you should target. Chances are that the competition will be furious. Picking a more narrow keyword, and check out the competition. You can use Google’s page rank for that. If it is more than 5 that’s tough, and you are going to struggle a lot to push your fresh new site up.
If you are selling Britney Spears posters, for example, the first keyword you might think of would be Britney Spears. But it’s not the best one, as a search on it would produce tons of sites about Britney and you’re likely to be at the bottom. Although the target audience for “Britney Spears” is much larger than the number of people searching for “Britney Spears Poster”, the latter are the most suitable keywords as they give you the chances to beat your real competitors. So, now you have your main keywords.
Another tip: Don’t chase the numbers, chase the quality. Hundreds of people who are not targeted at what you offer are much less useful than one who is.
Here are some good tools that can help you with keyword research:
Generally, there are two distinct strategies – optimize for a few very popular keywords or optimize for a large number of less popular words. The disadvantage of frequently used keyphrases is a high competition, the advantage is higher traffic. It is often best to use both strategies in combination.