When it comes to online business, keyword research is probably the most important part of your job when you’re setting out to design and construct a website. It really doesn’t matter what you’ve planned for the website, assuming that you do indeed have something planned for it, because if you want your website to be seen by others in any meaningful number, then you’ll need to pay particular attention to this task. Or, just get in touch with an expert virtual assistance provider to take care of this for you.
A keyword is basically a single word or a number of words strung together into a phrase describing something. Hence, your keyword could be “dogs” or something more complex, such as “yellow Labrador retrievers”. This second example is a phrase which is commonly known as a “long tail keyword”, or in other words, a more detailed description of what someone may be searching for. The success of a website is based around the relevance of a keyword or set of keywords – even if the owner of the site doesn’t realize it! In most circumstances, your chosen keywords should directly relate to the nature and purpose of your website.
It goes without saying, that if you’re going to get involved with website development for a meaningful purpose, maybe as a commercial entity, then you’ll need to plan its construction carefully. Part of this construction involves the correct selection of keywords appropriate to your subject, topic or niche. Once these keywords have been correctly selected you should construct your website accordingly, and in a fairly regimented fashion. This is known as search engine optimisation, as it is basically a way of ensuring that everyone else in the world has a way of finding your site if they are interested in what you’re saying, promoting or selling.
Keyword research is the cornerstone of this task. There are a variety of different points of view, but in our highly competitive world market, you should make sure that your keywords aren’t just appropriate, but realistic with respect to the level of competition too. As you’ll be attempting to “rank” for your chosen keywords (or come up as close to the from page as you possibly can inside the ubiquitous search engine rankings of websites which are specifically relevant to your particular niche), you need to ensure that you’ve an excellent chance of doing so, firstly, and then secondly plan and implement your personally tailored approach to supply yourself with the best chance possible.
One of the mistakes that many people (including some so-called SEO experts) make is to misinterpret the supply and demand for your keyword.
Demand: there are many tools, some more complex and more costly than others, which determine the demand for your keyword or long-tail keyword. In simple terms, how many people are searching for information directly related to your keywords. Google and others have a way of measuring the number of times that someone will search their engines for that exact keyword. They will supply you with figures which show, on a monthly basis and broken down into geographical territories if you wish, the number of times someone entered that phrase into the search box. This will give you a good idea of what the actual “demand” for information about your keyword is.
Supply: if you go to Google’s search page and enter your keyword in the search box, you’ll come up with a number of sites which Google considers to be relevant to that phrase. In some cases this can run into the many, many millions. If your keyword is – and it probably will be, a long tail, you should know that this initial supply figure is based on a broad analysis, and in order to get a realistic return on the number of relevant sites, you’ll need to enter your keyword in quotes “”. By doing this you’ll see that the number of sites returned is significantly lower, this being a good indication of the “supply” for that keyword. The websites returned in this way will be your competitors.
As you’ll quickly see from conducting this exercise, a very broad keyword – such as “dog”, has a very high demand and a very high supply. Don’t be tempted to run after this demand as the chances of ranking highly for this keyword are not that good. Generally speaking – the higher the demand, the higher the existing supply. However, part of the skill of keyword research is in developing long tail keywords that more accurately describe your particular niche. For example, if we research “yellow Labrador retrievers”, we can see that there is a reasonable amount of demand – somewhere in the region of 3000 searches per month for that term, and a low amount of supply – less than 1000 competing sites. In this example, we would likely include this exact keyword in our campaign. Keep in mind that if you’d like to rank high for any keywords, specialist virtual assistants can help you move forward fast.
This is just an overview into keyword research, which should be an integral part of your plan to develop your business. As any expert virtual assistant will tell you, the correct implementation of chosen keywords is an entirely different issue, but you must make sure that your keyword research is correctly founded and conducted before you move on.
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