The first step to establishing what keyword and phrases you should optimise your website for is to establish and understand what its goals and objectives are.
This is best done before you even build your website, but is also extremely valuable for existing websites, as part of your optimisation and fine-tuning efforts. Your website’s goals could be to:
- Increase enquiries from your website from level X to level Y
- Increase sales from your shopping website from $X to $Y
- Increase the rate at which people download your e-book or other file(s)
- Increase sign-ups to your newsletter
Understanding the goals of your website leads on to the crucial task of determining the keyphrases that are relevant to your website and business.
These keyphrases need to be relevant to your target market, business, industry and location and are essential for good performance on Google. They are the foundation of what is commonly called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
An excellent first step to determining what the keyphrases for your website should be is to do a search for your products and services on Google, just like your target market will do. Keep refining your search until you get a set of results in which you would like your website to appear, and there, you have determined one of your keyphrases. You’ll possibly see your competitors listed there.
Work your copy to be relevant to that phrase, and ensure that you have the keyphrases on the page in the right places like title tag, Meta tags and in H1 headings. And of course measure! There are plenty of free SEO tools around that will tell you your placings on Google for your keywords and phrases, and your website statistics will tell you how successful your newly identified keyphrases are at driving visitors to your website.
Author: Ashley Bryan
Webstrategies
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