Optimize a website for search engines - keyword research

In order to optimize a website for search engines you have a number of steps to undertake. Don't start to soon for example with, Link Building. The 1st step you must take is to determine the best keywords for your site. You want your site to be optimized for those few keywords that people actual search for and for which the competition is limited.

First make an Excel worksheet with the following columns:

* Keyword list
* Monthly search volume.
* Number of search results within Yahoo.
* Number of competitors with optimized pages

Start with the Keyword List, make a huge list of keywords.

These are keywords of which you think the searchers use them, words that you would like to be found for, words for which you may now be found (check your statistics). Check websites of your potential competitors sites. Make the list as long as possible and try different angles. Think of synonyms and wrong spelling of words, people often make mistakes. Search in Google or Wikipedia. Thinking of adding a location / place (if you're a local entrepreneur). You want only visitors on your page that are looking for your product. Make combinations of 2 or 3 words.

If you have created a nice list of keywords, then go to the Google Keyword tool:https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
The monthly volume of a search word in Google be found in this free tool. Check the box "Use synonyms" in the Google Keyword tool to get more keywords and word combinations. Put in your whole keyword-list! Below the list generated by Google, you see a possibility to export this list to excel. Add these words to your own excel list combined with the monthly search volumes, first and second column.

Next you go to Yahoo, and put every single keyword in the search box and hit 'search'. In the third column of your excel sheet, you put the number of search results that Yahoo reports, This number is on the top right.

Your real competition per keyword
Even more interesting is the number of competitors that have already optimizated their website for that particular keyword, because that is the competitive field you're facing once you've optimized your own site. Remember that this competitive field per keyword is completely different from the numbers you've put in column 3.

For the keyword 'mortgage' there are 8,430,000 results. Try to win from more than 8 million competitors...

Yet this is not your real competition field. If you optimize your site for the word 'mortgage' your site will win from all the pages that are not optimized.

But how do you find out how many pages there are optimized for "mortgage"?

You get a good indication by the following steps:

* Go to Yahoo.nl (Google provides only a summary, Yahoo all results)
* Put the following in the search box: intitle:mortgage inanchor:mortgage.
* In Yahoo you get 261,000 results

You see that out of 8,430,000 pages 261,000 but are optimized for search engines with the word 'mortgage'. Your competition field is decreased by 97%.

Of course, you'll not win from 261,000 competitors easily with a new site, but this 'trick' can be used for all the keywords in your list.

The value that you find for each keyword in Yahoo, you fill in the 4th column in your excel sheet. This way you get a good notion of which keywords you should use in your site title, headers, text and backlinks.