When it comes to determining all relevant keywords, should we attempt to do it ourselves or is it preferable to hire an experienced company or freelancers to perform this task?

The answer to this central question depends upon a number of related variables. Among the most important of those are these:

1. The extent to which you understand how to locate keywords and track down keywords that are closely related

2. The keyword software that you have at your disposal

3. Familiarity with using those keyword research tools

4. Your knowledge concerning determining which keywords are actually beneficial from a business perspective

5. Your budget

Glancing at those five, notice that they boil down to how much you have studied the process of keyword research and whether the outsourcing alternative is within your financial resources. I’ll go into each of those a little more deeply

What You Need to Know

Identifying relevant keywords and phrases is as important as any other part of your new business. In fact, it is more important than most of your planning. The lengthy list that you generate is central to all of your marketing efforts. The tactics impacted include your article marketing, your search engine optimization, your paid advertising and your copywriting. The entire future of you business is directly related to the quality of your keyword research.

Some available tools are free to use, such as Google’s keyword research tool. Others can be purchased as desktop software or as online membership applications. You must be willing and able to use a mix of these resources in order to develop the most comprehensive list. You should gather information comparing various keyword research software options.

Most of the tools are relatively easy to use, but the interpretation of your results can be difficult unless you have experience in doing so. Not all of the keywords that are uncovered are of equal value to a business, and a high volume of searches for a certain keyword does not necessarily make that keyword of greater importance to you than another term or phrase for which there may be substantially fewer searches.

Budget

I believe that even if your funds are limited, keyword research is so important that, if you are not capable of conducting and interpreting the study, this is a place to spend those precious financial resources. The expense of outsourcing keyword research is relatively small when it is compared to the potential benefit. I recommend that, if you do hire professionals for this task, that you make sure that they also do a competitive analysis of your industry or niche and offer advice concerning how to use the findings of the study to your competitive advantage.

Often keyword research is bundled into an overall search engine optimization (SEO) contract. These contracts are considerably more expensive. However, if you choose to go this route (contracting for an SEO package), make sure you understand exactly how thorough your SEO company will be.

It is possible to handle all of this on your own, if you are willing to take the time and invest the money in learning how to do it the correct way. Of course, you must also plan to invest in some of the software tools, as well.

There are a number of steps I always follow when optimizing a site for SEO (note these are just the high points, there are others that I don’t mention here, but these WILL take you a long way):

1) On a new site, I will include the keywords in a non hyphenated domain name (if you can get a .edu or .gov suffix do so, otherwise a cheap .info will do just fine)

2) If possible, I will rename the URL to each money page to include the main keyword for that page.

3) Set up Google Analytics for the site and ensure the tracking script is added to every page.

4) Go through the “money” pages and make sure that the title, descriptions and keywords meta tags are unique and optimized for the keywords on the page. In a competitive niche (over 1 million result pages in Google), I would limit the keywords to one main phrase, a couple of local modifiers and one or two more closely related terms per page.

5) Go through the non-money pages (i.e. pages that are irrelevant from an SEO perspective) and ensure the title and meta description tags are not duplicates of any of the money page tags. Google Webmaster tools will identify this for you once your site has been crawled.

6) I nofollow any links to overhead pages from all of the pages on the site with the exception of the home page. I leave the home page links as follow links, since I want the SEs to index all pages on the site and having privacy, contact, disclaimer, etc overhead pages add to Google’s view of the “trust” for the site. On all other pages I just want the link to the home page to be a follow link, so I can build up the page rank of the home page. I handle this in Dreamweaver by using two different site templates, one for the home page and one for the rest of the pages on the site. If your main keyword page is something other than the home page, modify your approach accordingly.

7) I then optimize each pages content for it’s main keywords, modifiers and related terms. It’s important that each word or phrase used in the keyword META is found somewhere on the page to avoid keyword spam penalties.

At this point the on page optimization is complete enough to start with link building. As you may already know, building links is hard. I use articles, blog posts, submit forms on relevant sites, reciprocal links, etc. There are ways to make this process less time consuming, without going black or even grey hat. Contact me at Mississauga Search Engine Marketing if interested.

What is SEO? Many people have no clue what it means or how to use it to help their websites gain readership and better placement in the rankings. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from the search engines that exist today by means of “natural” results. This means by honest traffic through honest searches and not by means of influencing of any type.

When the owner of a website or blog builds rank and search engine placement up by means other than natural growth they are practicing Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is not acceptable to any search engine and will lead to the website in questions being removed from the indexes. This type of SEO is normally accomplished by the owner having a link farm or by key word padding in their sites content.

The higher up on the search page the website is placed, the more visitors it will get from the search engine. This means that your site, if it has high page rank; will be seen on an earlier page than pages with similar content will and so visitors will most likely come to your website first. This means the site will have more page views which are good if you have pay per view or click advertising on your website and also increases for back links to your website.

Getting good navigation throughout your website is crucial and many blogs such as essential finance or finance hub lead the way in smooth navigation from page to page. It is essential to link web pages together within the website. This enables customers to have a quick transition thoughout the website.

SEO can target many different types of search, images, local (geographic search) and industry specific search called vertical search. This means that if you have content that is specific to one topic and images on the website they will both be gathered for search results. This can be a help to websites that are new but webmasters need to remember to tag the photos for proper indexing.

The main goal of SEO is to see how search engines function and to record who people use the search engines while surfing for topical information. When this information is gathered and recorded the website owner can then modify their sites HTML code to better utilize the search engines for more visitors. By doing this, the website owner is practicing what is called Internet Marketing.

SEO is important no matter why type of website owner you are, from high level business to the stay at home mommy blogger. We all want our content seen by viewers whether it is for income purposes or for topical purposes. This means that a bit of research into how to better perform in the SEO rankings will be a benefit to your site.

Linkvana is a good tool to use for quality Linkbuilding services.