How to identify good keyword for your website?

In SEO, one of the main thing to perform before any activity is to do keyword analysis. Keyword analysis will determine the route you take for future SEO actions and also how you model the type of content you want to publish on your website. The first question a person has to ask himself when doing keyword analysis is:

“What sort of keyword do I visualize someone who doesn’t know of my site typed into search engine and I want them to see my site appearing in the search result page?”

In general, there are a few category of keyword. We shall name them big, small and medium sized keyword. For our case study, we will choose a website such as MIX09 which is a Microsoft event for designers and web developers.

If you are the site owner of MIX09, you will want to do some brainstorming with your team to identify potential keywords which may be related to your site. You can use tools such as mind-maps to identify those potential keyword.

As you can gather from this,

Big Keywords: Generic keyword that most people will search. Such keyword will tend to receive the most amount of traffic and are the hardest to be ranked. They are usually short in length and a lot of your competitors are probably targeting the same keyword. However, these are keyword that are most important.

Medium Sized Keyword: These keyword are an extension of big keywords. They may contain parts of a big keyword + <something else> or they can be a mixture of 2 or more big keyword. They receive moderate amount of traffic and they are most likely targeted by your close competitor so it’s fairly easy to get onto the top ranking of such keyword.

Small Keyword: For small keyword, they are pretty specific keyword that is only relevant to your site. These set of keyword usually gets the least amount of traffic and people who do searches using this type of keyword probably knows what they are searching for.

To generate the list, it will be good to involve as many people as possible even if they are not on your team. It’ll be even better if you have the consumer of your product brainstorm with you on keywords as they have the best knowledge in the type of keyword they use to search your site. Once you are done with the site, you can make use of search engine tools such in the various webmaster center to see the traffic generated from those keyword. Most search engine do provide some data on the trends of the keyword. Simple modification to your keyword will sometime makes a huge difference such as “sport” and “sports”. (Sports received more than 10 times more traffic than Sport in certain countries).

Once you keyword list is out, you start implementing simple SEO changes to your site. You should try as much as possible to capture the traffic from big keyword as they are the main crowd puller and allow potential visitors who doesn’t have knowledge of your site to visit your site because they are searching on the terms you are targeting. That being said, it’s very important to track your Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ranking over a period of time to see if they improves after you implement some SEO fixes to your site. That is being discussed on this post: http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/03/30/start-with-seo-in-mind-to-get-more-traffic-to-your-blog.aspx