Phase 1: Brainstorming Keywords
The first step to developing an effective keyword strategy is to start brainstorming. Brain storming keywords is great with colleagues and search engine users who may not have an interest in your service or product and seeks to develop a list of possible search terms, words search engine users might use to find your website, services or products. Don’t worry if you have a large list the more the merrier. In Phase 2: Using Online Tools to Discover Core Terms, we will begin narrowing list considerably.
In Phase 1 we seek to develop single keywords and short phrase lists, core terms, in both singular and plural from, stemming and spelling and the use of “stop words”. We will also briefly mention two free online tools that we us every day.
The Use of Single Keywords and Short Phrases
While many consider the use of individual keywords or short phrases as being important, generally speaking they are too broad to actually help you get the right visitors to your website.
To illustrate this idea, let’s look at our above example of a vacation rental property website in Buenos Aires: www.bastay.com. What if we only used single keywords such as rentals, vacation, apartment and apartments or even the short phrase real estate? Imagine the thousands of visitors we might receive in any given day if you were able to get good ranking for those keywords? Now imagine how many of those website visitors would not be interested in rental property in Buenos Aires?
The development of single keywords and short phrases is a vital part of the first phase of developing an effective keyword strategy, mainly for their brainstorming value before you really start to think about quality website traffic and not just visits. However, we must learn as we go on that the more specific we are with our terms the more appropriate the site visitors will be.
Before you go any further in this chapter, we suggest that you take the time to sit down with pen and paper and write out 5 to 10 single keywords or short phrases that describe your website, products or services. These words and phrases will form the foundation of your site content as they will help you develop the themes for core terms you will eventually use to create your final keywords and keyword phrases to use to organize the content for each web page. Remember that Search Engine Marketing People start with a website plan that equals quality traffic.
Singular and Plural, Stemming, Misspelling and Stop Words
Although common sense might tell us that a person looking for an apartment in Buenos Aires might also be looking for apartments in Buenos Aires, search engines to not draw that distinction. For this reason anytime you target a keyword for search engines, you must be sure to target both the singular and plural version.
Word stemming is the use of various forms of the same root word and is very important also. Many people might consider keywords only using one form of the root word such as write, writing, written. Again, the search engines distinguish those terms as being very different. Just as you want to use both the singular and plural forms of a word, you must look to using all appropriate forms of the root word. This will expand the possibility of attracting search engine users and them finding your website.
Spelling is important too. Many of us could not spell correctly if our lives depended on it. Therefore using common misspellings of words in the development one’s keyword strategy can help bring a few more visitors to the site from the search engines. Having said that, Google and other search engines off you corrections and we would suggest that you forget about misspellings until you really know what you are doing or if your services or product is misspelled by people in their thousands everyday.
Along the same lines, there can be a lot of differences between spelling in the USA and in Great Britain and depending on your target clientèle, you might consider using both spellings throughout the website. For example, some forms of to travel differ from the USA to the U.K. Traveling is preferred in the USA while travelling is the correct spelling in Britain. The USA uses color, the U.K. colour. This distinction can make all the difference in the world depending on whether you are trying to find clients from the USA, Great Britain, or both.
In the past, it was believed that stop words (short common words such as a, an, and, the) created problems in the search engines. Nowadays it is more likely that they will actually help as searcher will almost invariably use them in their search terms and phrases when using search engines to find websites.
Online Tools
Google has created a free online tool to assist with brainstorming keywords. You can find Google’s “Adwords Keyword Tool” online at:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Microsoft has a prediction tool that is good for assessing whether people are using a search term to make a purchase or as part of a research effort. You can find MSN’s “Online Commercial Intent” prediction tool at:
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/OCI.aspx
You can download free seo tools and free seo software here:
Got any questions ask Search Engine Marketing People