Keyword Analysis

Where do you start when you want to do a website keyword analysis and choose powerful keywords?

 

Start by entering all the obvious keywords into a text editor. Any keywords that come to mind write them all down.

 

Then look at your website's access logs. Most Stat packages provided by hosting provides will give you a list of keywords that people used to find you through the search engines.

 

Look also at your competitors keyword tags. To do this simply go to a competitors website, and open the source code of a few pages at each site - just choose: View - Source from the browser's menu bar. Look for the <META NAME="Keywords"> and see if you can find any additional keywords.

 

Get the list you now have and brain storm with your colleagues to see if you can come up with more possible keywords. Get people involved that don't necessarily know your business that well and ask them if they were looking for your product what terms would you use to search?

 

At this stage you should have quite a bid list of words. Now take a slightly different view at the list and look for:


obvious spelling mistakes - examples of common misspellings are for the words calendar and currency

synonyms - sometimes similar words are missed. Using a thesaurus is a good place to find more synonyms

Split or merged words - e.g. knowledgebase vs. knowledge base

Singulars and plurals - Go through your list and add singulars and plurals. Search engines treat singulars and plurals differently

Hyphenated words - Are there any hyphenated words on your list that could be used differently, or visa-versa? e.g. e-commerce or ecommerce and email or e-mail

Geo-specific terms - is it important where you are located? If so include your city.

Company name - are there different ways of referring to your company? e.g. thedesignpool ; thehostingpool ; The Hosting Pool 


You are now at the stage where you are ready to do the actual keywords analysis and to do that you need a keyword tool. There are are many software tools and web-based services that offer this function, simply search for it on the web.

 

However, a keyword analysis site and keyword analysis tool that virtually all professionals use is Wordtracker. This tool has access to data from several very large metacrawlers. A metacrawler is a system that searches multiple search engines for you.