The Daily Start-Up: 2015

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Researching my Competitor Keywords

With any business, its a good idea to see what the competition is up to. Before spending money and wasting time driving traffic and hoping for good results, try seeing what you competition is doing.

One of the best and easiest ways to what your competition is up to is by looking them up on the search engines. Use the keywords you came up with in your brainstorming session and see what comes up in Google, Yahoo and bing. Google will bold your search terms on the results, but these words are less important than the words that surround them.

Sometimes Google will give you a "Did you mean ___?" phrase to help refine your search. These phrases can help you find the better keywords to use.

Make sure to notice the highest listings and look at the words surrounding your keywords. These phrases and words can make all the difference when attempting to get your page ranked.

Once you have a good idea of some keywords your competition is using, then its time to checkout their websites. Because search engines look at content and keywords together, you will want to find ways to improve on what they are already doing. This is important if you're looking to take that industries traffic and build back-links to your pages. Checking out a sites metadata is also a great way to find the keywords they're using.

To check out your competitors keywords in the metadata right click on the screen and inspect element. In Chrome this is especially easy and worth it. The keywords will be found in the <head></head> section of the code near the top.

Friday, January 2, 2015

How to find Keywords that match my website theme

Figuring out the purpose of your website is easy and direct. But this is the step that people often overlook when building a new website. Don't miss out on all the traffic you can generate by find the core purpose and them of your website and sticking to it.

[Airline Pilot Demand] is a great keyword phrase.

If this step is something you missed, you can correct the problem by finding the theme of your existing website now. To do this you must find out Exactly what your site is about and what kinds of visitors you need.

If you are a website that focuses on selling home-built airplanes, you need to find exactly what that means, narrowing down the kinds of airplanes you consider to be home-built is mission critical. You may also consider the direction you wish to take the website in the future. Think about if you only want to show home-built airplanes or if sometime in the future you might consider expanding your website with classic aircraft that aren't exactly home-built.

You also should spend some time thinking about your service area. Are you a local business, or would you consider working on a global market. The more specific you get the better your keywords will match up with the right people.

After taking some time to write down what your website is about and all the things you are NOT about you might have a list that looks something like this:

We work on only airplanes that are built between the years 1950 and 1970
The airplanes we work on are American-made; not foreign
We install only radios that existed in the 1950's on all our airplanes
We are a local business, but do except clients from all over the Country
We help sell Non-Home-Built Airplanes

Now that you've figured out your theme, we need to develop keywords that best represent our theme. Remember that at this point there are NO bad keywords. You need to think of a big list of possibilities. Here are some tips to help you develop this big list.

Natural Language: What would I search for to find products like mine?
Other Perspectives: What would someone else call what I do? (try asking your mom to define what you do)
Customer Mindset: How do "normal" people speak of products you offer?
Industry Jargon: What do the "experts" say when searching for your product?

How to Organize my List of Keywords

create a list of keywords that best work with my website

While you are compiling all the keywords for your website you should think about them in broad and narrow ideas. You will want to build a small chart with broad keywords on the left and more specific keywords on the right. This will help you find the great keywords later. Do something like this:

Keyword list guide

home-built airplanes

home-built airplanes 1950 - 1970

Classic Airplanes America

Classic Airplanes Cessna

Classic Airplanes Cessna 172

Classic Airplanes Cessna 172rg

Classic Airplanes Cessna 172 not flyable

Home-built Airplane RV4

Home-built Airplane RV4 red paint

Now that you have your list built, lets take a hard and long look to see which ones go best with your theme. A good trick to use is to put your list in word, right click on each work and look for synonyms. Any keyword that has a similar meaning is a good keyword.

You can also use the search engines to find good keyword synonyms by using ~ before the word you want synonyms for. for example: [~classic aircrafts] returns searches that also contain the word [Vintage].

how to find keywords that work with my website for more traffic

What are Keywords for Search Engines

Picking and choosing keywords for any site is important. Some people might even say without a good keyword strategy you might consider a day job instead of starting an online business.

Search Engine Spiders (a program used to categorize the internet) are looking for keywords that match or nearly match related search terms and queries.

A keyword is a specific word or phrase a search engine looks for in its index. For example, airplane is a keyword. An Index is a giant list of websites found on the internet. For example, http://www.trade-a-plane.com/ is a website with many keywords in it's pages.

Does that seem easy enough? Just build a website and pick some great phrases and away you go, right? Wrong! Out of the millions of websites their are millions of websites without any traffic. Let's say you have a website about airplanes. But the site doesn't have any traffic.

Let me give you a tip:

Think about what kind of website you really want and what kind of keywords you're using to describing content in your website. If your website is about airplanes and you're using general keywords like [aircraft] and [aviation]. How many people actually search for [classic aircraft] when searching the internet? Not many. Most people would search for words like [old fight jet] or [world war 2 airplane] when they want to know something about classic aircrafts. These small details can make a world of difference in keyword strategies and the volume of visitors to your site.