Choosing Keywords for your content

Choosing keywords is an essential part of optimising your sites content for search engines.  You need to make sure that you rank for the correct keywords which are relevant to your site.  If you are a plumber, there is no point you showing up in search results for florists.

It’s not about getting as many visitors to your site as you can, but about attracting visitors who are likely to require your products or services.

What is a keyword?

The term keyword is slightly misleading as it’s not always one word, but can be a phrase.  In fact it will be incredibly difficult to rank in search results for a single word. If you think of it more as a key phrase which defines the purpose of your particular page or post.

When someone types a phrase in to a search engine, that hopefully will be matched with the keyword or phrase you have optimised your page for.  If successful your page should be returned somewhere, hopefully near the top of the results.

How do I go about choosing keywords for my site?

First you need to think about what a visitor may type when looking for your products/services.  Some keywords are fairly obvious if your products/services have specific titles, for example if you sell an “X100 Widget”.

However if you offer a general service which others in your town or area provide then it’s a bit trickier.  For example you may need to look at keywords like “plumbing services oxford”.  Remember you are looking to take advantage of phrases which people are likely to search for.

Keyword Competition

Choosing your keywords may well be easy enough to do, but you may well be competing with many other websites who rank well for them too.  Whilst it is possible to rank well for your keywords it may be near impossible to get to the top against well established websites.

How do I use the keywords?

Each of your services or products should have it’s own page, and the content on that page should be optimised specifically for it.  It’s not a good idea to have multiple services/products on a page in a list, as it won’t be clear which is the once you want to optimise on.

Thinking about how you structure your page based around your chosen keyword will make a big difference to how it’s viewed by the search engines.