Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1

Employing Keyword Research Techniques and Tools

In This Chapter

• Discovering your site theme
• Brainstorming for keywords
• Creating a keyword-based outline
• Choosing related keywords
• Researching keywords by niche
• Evaluating keywords

In this chapter, we talk about picking and choosing your keywords. This is an extremely important step. You might say the mantra of search engines should be “keywords, keywords, keywords.” Search engine spiders (the bots that go through your page gathering web page data) are looking for keywords that match or closely relate to the search query. A keyword is a specific word or phrase a search engine looks for in its index (the list of websites it looks at during a search), based on what the user typed as the search query. For example, [cars] could be a keyword for a website that deals with restoring classic cars.

It seems simple enough: Just figure out a couple of great keywords and go! Unfortunately, there’s more to picking keywords than that. Say you’ve got a website that specializes in selling custom-made classic automobiles. But the site isn't receiving the traffic (number of visitors) it should. Here’s a tip: Think about what kind of keywords you used in your website. You might be using general keywords like [automobiles] and [vehicles], but how many people actually type in a search query of [classic automobiles]? Nine times out of ten people are going to be looking for [classic cars]. Little distinctions like this can make a big difference ...