SEO Series - Keyword Analysis

The first and crucial step to optimising a web site is ensuring the right keywords are used.What is required to start off on SEO is keyword analysis.

Things to keep in mind are

• Words that best describe the site
• Words used by competitor's sites
  
• Search Words for the site

Analysis tools

• Google Analysis Tool
• SubmitExpress
• Webmaster ToolKit
• SEO Chat

Steps for Keyword Optimisation

• Spy on Competitors - Search for your product or service and see which web sites are highly rated.Analyse their keywords by looking their source code.Use the tools on their site and analyse the prominence of keywords on their page to get a better understanding where you are lacking and get a idea on where to improvise.
• Keyword Phrase Research - Research the ways your keywords can be put to better use.Remember MODERATION is key to ensuring the credibility.Keyword stuffing will be taken as spam and may lead to the site being removed from the search engine's index.The optimum frequency to opt for would be 2-9 %
  
• Keyword Optimization - Google uses keyword stemming i.e only stems of search words are taken as query.So if your site covers travel it is not necessary to include travels,travelling as your keywords.You could think of synonyms and words that better describe travel such as holiday or vacation.A user is more prone to search the net for "seaside holidays" than "Florida+travel".Try to put yourself in a user's perspective to decide on effective keywords.
• Integration with the website - Using keywords is not sufficient by itself, presenting it effectively has wider impact.Try using your keywords in H1 or H2 tags or even Bold tags.This sends a message to the crawler that your site is credible not just yet another black hat attempt.Ensure the initial and last few lines contain a higher frequency of keywords.Use them in IMG and META tags.(Will be covered in greater detail in a later article
  

Next article is Tag-Based Optimisation that is how to use the functionality of various tags to improve the site rankings.The article will deal with meta,heading,formatting,anchor,image and comment tags in more detail.