Keyword discovery - When a user visits a search engine, they type words into the search box to find what they are looking for. The search terms they type are called keywords and the combinations of keywords are keyphrases. If you imagine that building an optimized site is like cooking a meal, then keywords are the essential ingredients. Would you attempt to cook a complex new dish without first referring to a recipe? Would you start before you had all the ingredients available and properly prepared? In our analogy, keywords are your ingredients and the rest of the sevenstep approach is your recipe. Ideally, you should undertake keyword research well before you choose a domain name, structure your site, and build your content. However, this is not always possible, as most webmasters only turn to SEO after they’ve built their site.
Even if you have a site already, it is vital to invest significant time and energy on keyword research before starting your SEO campaign. Although this may astonish you, I would recommend that 20% of all your SEO effort is focused on this activity alone. If you make poor keyword selections, you are likely to waste energy elsewhere in your SEO campaign, pursuing avenues unlikely to yield traffic in sufficient quantity, quality, or both. To return to our analogy, if you select poor ingredients, no matter how good the recipe may be the meal itself will be a disappointment – and no one will want to eat it. Don’t forget that one source for information about keywords is your own web logs. This helps you avoid undoing what you’re already ranking well for. Google Analytics’ keyword stats can also be particularly useful input to the early stages of an SEO campaign (see page 225 for more on this). I learnt this lesson from a client who ran a local catering business. She told me that many of her customers had found her via Google, but she couldn’t understand what they were searching on as she could never find her site in the top 50, let alone the top 10. By investigating her Google Analytics stats, we discovered that she was ranking well for “thanksgiving catering” due to some client testimonials and pictures on her site. This explained why so many of her clients were ex-pat Americans and how they were finding her business; after all, such a search term was pretty niche in South West London, UK!
