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How To Steer Clear Of Major Keyword Mistakes
It would be nice if keyword research was an exact science, but it's not. Contrary to what marketing firms selling the latest, greatest and most expensive selection tools will tell you, this type of research is more of a form of art.
It would be nice if keyword research was an exact science, but it’s not. Contrary to what marketing firms selling the latest, greatest and most expensive selection tools will tell you, this type of research is more of a form of art.
Science or not, keyword selection can be absolutely vital for a site’s success. Considering this, it is important to choose good ones. There are some very common pitfalls webmasters run into when selecting words. Understanding what they are can help you avoid making them, too.
The biggest keyword related mistake, hands down, is failing to see how important they are. It’s a simple fact that keywords are very powerful marketing tools. They help sites earn traffic, ranking and even revenue. They can even help focus the entire theme of a site. Although hiring an expensive firm isn’t required to see results, selecting goods keywords is important.
The research process itself tends to stymie some. The biggest pitfall here is incorrect use of keyword research tools. For example, many believe keyword counts revealed by these tools are accurate. The truth is they are just estimates. Tools that can help you see these estimates are useful, but they don’t reflect the total number of searches from all major search engines. It is possible to compensate by using several tools for research. Programs like Ad Word Analyzer, and Wordtracker are both great. And you will find unique keywords with each, so your list will be more complete.
Using no keywords isn’t a good idea, but neither is using only a single word or phrase. The best strategy is to pick a theme and then choose words and phrases that build on that theme. This enables sites to work better with latent semantic indexing. WordNet can be very useful for selecting the right niche phrases to build a site around.
Relying solely on the Keyword Effectiveness Index, or KEI, is also not a great idea. This is the ratio of the number of times a keyword gets searched to the number of sites that rank for the word. This is used to gauge how much competition exists in a particular area. KEI is useful, but you also want to find out how SEO strong the top few sites in a niche happen to be. There are other tools that you can use for checking out competition levels. SEO for Firefox or SeoQuake are good ones to test out.
Webmasters who really get the power of keywords often box themselves in with too much research. The mistake these folks make is failing to use keyword management tools to direct their efforts. Spreadsheets can help, but tools like Ad Word Analyzer can be much more valuable. They can sort, filter, and even list related keywords you never would have come up with on your own.
Publishers sometimes jump the gun on doing their research. It is important to remember that tools like Wordtracker store data for the past 90 days. This means researching words at off times can result in skewed numbers. Doing a Christmas keyword search in June, for example, will not produce the world’s greatest results. Timing research is important.
The last two major hurdles that get in the way of keyword selection are being too greedy with keyword selection and doing research, but never cultivating it. A lot of publishers pick the highest possible paying keywords and stick with them. The reality here is that lower paying, niche keywords and even long-tail keywords pay less per click, but they can pay off with more incoming traffic over the long run. This is true, because there aren’t as many competing sites as with other high paying keywords.
The art of keyword selection is one that is important to a site’s overall chances for success. Finding the most effective keywords does take time and patience, but it isn’t an exact science.