Aug

Identifying Your Keywords – Extreme SEO Makeover Series

written by yankeerudy

- August 27th, 2009

As I mentioned previously, I’m transforming my recent “Extreme SEO Makeover” seminar into blog form. Today’s topic covers the foundation of any SEO effort, your keyword list.

Having a good keyword list is the foundation of all SEO work. Without keywords, it’s hard to optimize pages – I mean, what’re you optimizing for, if not keywords? What anchor text will you use for your link-building, and where will those links point? Yes, keywords are at the heart of your SEO efforts.

Remember, at this point we’re collecting a big list of keywords – words or phrases that visitors and potential visitors might use to search for you. This should not be confused with keyword research – we’ll cover that next time. No, for now we’re just making a non-judgmental list and will worry about how good the keywords are later.

So how to begin? To make a comprehensive keyword list, you need to assume several different points of view:

Customers – What might your customers type into a search engine? I’m not talking about the industry jargon you use, but what they might want. So, if every right-thinking engineer calls your widget a T101 but the typical layman calls it a ‘creeper bot’, then you’d better include ‘creeper bot’ in your keyword list.
'Screw Flanders', if the boss wants it

Site Owner – If you’re doing SEO for a client, you definitely need to take into account any keywords the client wants to rank for (no matter how useless or strange they might seem to you). You want to keep the client happy. Alternately, if you’re an in-house SEO specialist and the boss has some keywords s/he wants to rank for then you sure as hell better include them too. Like the consultant, you want to keep your job. So if your website is about fire trucks but the client/boss wants to rank for ‘screw Flanders‘ then by all means put it on the list.
Competition – When we were in school, teachers discouraged us from copying from our neighbors. Guess what? We’re not in school anymore! By all means, you should check out what your competition is doing and include keywords they’re using in your list. Sometimes they might come up with some you haven’t considered yet, or at the very least you can see what a crap job they’re doing at SEO. Look at their sitemap and menu navigation, and elsewhere on their pages for ideas.
You – OK, you’ve put yourself in everyone else’s shoes. What are you missing? Put on a thinking cap and round out your list with alternative versions of keywords you already have (i.e., turn ‘wii games’ into ‘Wii Sports Resort‘ or ‘Wii Fit‘).

When making my keyword list I like to use a spreadsheet program like Excel or Open Office. Run the keywords down one column, and add columns next to it for each of your sources (boss, competition, etc.) and make a tick mark for each keyword so you know where it’s being used. (Use separate columns for each of your competition so you know who’s working what.) In fact, instead of tick marks put a 1 in each cell; you can sum the row for each keyword and the highest sum has the most support.

One tool you can use to get keyword ideas is the Google Keyword Tool. You’ll find it in your (free) Adwords account, under the Tools menu. This tool has two general keyword uses; we’ll cover the first here, and the second next time.

SEO Tool: Google Keyword Tool

To get keyword ideas from your site or a competitor, just choose the “Website Content” radio button and enter the URL. (Check the box to examine the entire site, or leave it unchecked to just examine the one page you entered.) The list you get will be the keywords that Google believes the page/site could be about. You can ignore the rest of the output for now, but we’ll come back and work with that next time.

Once you have your master keyword list, you’ll need to move on to evaluating that list and deciding which keywords to focus on. That’ll be the topic for the next post in this series.