Keyword Research Is The Basic Of Search Engine Optimization

I This was the ‘Twitter Question of the Week’ asked by Jill Whalen, the SEM expert, from her Twitter followers some time back.

Six of them replied, and surprisingly, one of them who said she/he was a newbie, gave the right answer. Without keyword research, as Jill summed up, nothing will work though content creation, titles, and anchor text are extremely important.

I have a feeling that the other respondents, most likely with good experience in practicing SEO, missed mentioning the importance of keywords because they assumed no one could possibly avoid researching keywords since it is the basic of any SEO effort.

Well, I have learned assuming can be a costly proposition, and it’s rather the simple things that have the largest appeals. The trick to success, I’m yet to fathom fully how to do, is doing simple things where the people in need are expected to be.

Coming back to the topic on hand, admittedly, keyword research is the first step toward the larger objective of optimizing webpage(s) for search engines. The question is how to research SEO keywords that are ideal for use in your webpage(s).

There are quite a few keyword suggestion tool, and among them the free AdWords Keyword Tool from Google is a good place to start searching the likely keywords.

In this article, let me take a rather basic approach to ferret out keywords that are in use by website owners at large in different countries. Remember you can find out the demand popularity of keywords from the Google keywords tool. But what about competition? How many competing websites use the keywords you plan to use? There are sophisticated keyword tools to get that information, but let me use a simple technique.

Let me suppose your business is selling fashion sunglasses – why that you may wonder…well, no particular reason really! – and you’ve good knowledge about the products you sell. If ‘fashion sunglasses’ is the keyword to be researched upon, here are the 3 ways I’d use to find the keyword popularity in terms of number of web pages optimized for it.

 

Broad Search

As the term implies, let me Google the keyword ‘fashion sunglasses’ without the quotes. I use ‘www.google.com’ for the search, and the result shows about 25,000,000 pages that have both the words in them. Take a look at the following image of the search results. The second one does not have the word ‘fashion’ in it, while the third one has the word connected with ‘celebrity’. In other words, in broad search the two words may or may not appear together, and sometimes one of them may not appear in the search result at all.

You may think why does a search result as high as in the second position not have both the search words! There can be many reasons for that, which we may discuss later. For now, let us turn our attention to the next technique, which is the exact match search.

 

Exact Match Search

For getting better idea about the usage of our search term, we now Google the words ‘fashion sunglasses’ again, this time within quotes. This means the 2 words will appear together in the search results, and that the pages that are listed essentially have the words together in them.

The following image shows the search results. There are now 1,980,000 results, over 12 times less than broad search. The top 2 results are the same as in the last example, and surprisingly the second result is there in spite of not having the word ‘fashion’ in it. Obviously, Google places lot of importance on the second result!

 

In-Title Exact Search

In this step the aim is to find out search results where the exact term, ‘fashion sunglasses’, appears in the title tag of the webpages. Since any properly optimized webpage must have the targeted keywords in the page title, therefore this action will show up the number of such pages. Our search string for in-title exact search will be “intitle:”fashion sunglasses”“.

Googling the term yields 329,000 results (see image above). This is not a small figure, but small enough to be more than 6 times less than the exact search figures, and nearly 76 times less than the broad search figures.

Remarkably, the top rank is retained by the same webpage, though the second and third ranks now show different pages. The third-ranked page in the exact search now moves one notch above to occupy the second place.

 

More Keyword Research

The above figures simply show that the number of pages optimized for a search term is far less than the number of pages that are not but are ranked by Google in search results. This analysis is preliminary and you will need more research to decide what keywords are the best for your needs. For example, you can extend your keyword research by doing the same tests in Google’s other country-specific websites, like ‘www.google.com.au’, ‘www.google.co.uk’, and so on.

There are however a few points that can be concluded from this research:

• The AdWords keyword research tool reveals that there are 40,500 global monthly searches for the exact term, ‘fashion sunglasses’. If this is taken as the demand for the term, the supply of pages can be said to be overwhelmingly more. Even the pages with optimized title tag number 8 times more than the demand for the term.
• From the Google search results it is obvious that the pages ranked are all about buying fashion sunglasses. This means that Google automatically analyses a search term to understand the intent behind the search. Thus, if you search for the term, ‘sunglass ultraviolet rays’, all the pages listed by Google are academic papers, and not connected with the buying of the item. In other words, if your webpage deals on the harmful effects of using unbranded sunglasses, then it will not be a good idea to optimize the page for the term, fashion sunglasses. For, in that case, the chance of your page ranking well for the term is very remote, rather impossible.
• The need of a set of good keyword research tools cannot be replaced by the above analysis. As noted at the beginning of this article, you must know the necessary keywords as the first step for search engine optimization. After you have some 20-25 keywords ready at the least, you can attempt the in-title exact search to gauge the supply-side of the webpages optimized for those keywords.