Netallianz

By Larry Lam

Keyword selection is the first and arguably the most important stage in any search engine optimization effort. If you do not choose correct keyword phrases, you will miss on your target audience and most likely will not maximize ROI on your web design and SEO efforts.

1. Target keyword phrases that people actually search for

You may have come across SEO companies or web designers who promise to get you into the Top 10 of Google and Yahoo. What’s more, they offer a fully-guaranteed service.

To avoid being duped, you need to understand what they are offering, ie what keyword phrase are they talking about?

Let’s say you are selling fashion accessories – shoes, ties, belts, wallets and shirts. And your web designer promises to get you to the top of Google.

If you search for the single word “shoes” in Google, there are some 100 million+ results. That’s a lot of competing websites. Likewise for “ties” 90 million results (as at the time of writing)

Now try searching for “shoes, ties, belts, wallets and shirts” and you will see that there are only 1.4 million results (the number of results are shown at the top right of the Google search).

The reality is that it is actually much easier to top the results for “shoes, ties, belts, wallets and shirts” compared to the single word “shoes”.

But what are the chances that someone will actually search for such a long and specific keyword phrase like the one above? Common sense will tell you that very few people will search for that phrase in the same exact order, word for word, punctuation for punctuation and spacing for spacing.

Bottom Line: Don’t be fooled by promises to get you to the top of Google and Yahoo with minimal effort and cost.

2. Consider your Target Audience: Target What You Can Handle

Let’s take an example of a web hosting company wanting to optimize its website for search engines.

During October 2005, there were 1,484,881 searches for the keyword phrase “web hosting” in Overture.

Imagine your website traffic if you are positioned at the top of major search engines! And that’s just for Overture…. Not to mention Google, Yahoo and MSN.

If you are a web hosting company in Malaysia, you can choose to target “web hosting” as your keyword phrase. But a link check in Google shows that the top 3 companies for the search term “web hosting” had 68,800, 67,400 and 2,400 incoming links respectively. To position your website at the top of this list would be very costly because of the time and effort it takes to build such a large number of incoming links.

In contrast, the keyword phrase “web hosting malaysia” attracted 1,669 searches in Overture during October 2005. That’s a far cry from the 1.5 million searches for just “web hosting”.

Big is not always better

The top 3 companies for “web hosting malaysia” in Google had 86, 117 and 57 incoming links respectively. That’s a lot easier and cheaper to trump compared to 68,000+ links for the website that topped “web hosting”.

If you are a Malaysian web hosting company servicing the local market in Malaysia, you should be able to pull in decent leads from the thousands of searches every month if you were topping Google, Yahoo and MSN. More business than you can handle probably.

Even if you top the search engines for “web hosting”, most likely you would not have the manpower to take advantage of all the inquiries that came through your website.

Bottom Line: Focus on your ROI and go for a keyword phrase that is appropriate for your type and size of business.

3. Buy Phrases

Consider choosing “buy phrases” for your website if it’s an ecommerce website. For example, you are an online watch shop selling branded watches. You can target a keyword like “Rolex” which has a large number of searches. Alternatively you can target “buy phrases” such as

• rolex dealer
• rolex daytona for sale
• rolex watch for sale
• cheap rolex

Topping the search engine for “rolex” will bring a lot of traffic. But the problem is that a lot of people searching for this keyword will not even be looking to buy a Rolex. Therefore your conversion ratio will be lower compared to topping the search engine for a buy phrase such as “rolex watch for sale”.

4. Keyword Phrase Variations

Sometimes, people search for keyword phrases in different ways. In our experience for example, most people may search for “web design malaysia” but a small minority may search for “webdesign Malaysia” without the spacing. Try to think like a layman and understand the potential phrase variation.

Also consider spelling mistakes in your keywords. Have you ever had trouble spelling or typing a keyword phrase? Maybe others would have the same problem, so consider targeting the misspelled keyword also.

Useful Tools for Keyword Selection

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
Just type in a keyword here to see how many searches were done in Overture for that keyword during a particular month.

Wordtracker
Wordtracker is also a keyword research tool. There is a free trials service that lets you see the keywords being searched in Alta Vista. The paid service gives your access to keyword searches in Google and Yahoo. Unlike Overture, Wordtracker differentiates between plural and singular searches, does not correct spelling (it gives the number of searches for misspelled words also, rather than correcting them and giving a total for both correctly and wrongly spelled words).