Common Keyword Research Mistakes - 1
Avoiding Keyword Research Completely!
Do you completely avoid Keyword Research? Surprisingly this is something a large but silent majority of people do. Some think it is a waste of time and some, despite knowing the importance of keyword research, forget about it or find no time to do it.
The truth is, even a very basic keyword research and a subsequent web page tweak can get you rich rewards.
One of the justifications often used for not doing keyword research is that getting inbound links is much more important. While having a large number of other sites linking to you is very useful (and important) not doing keyword research is a very big mistake.
Search engines base their ranking based on a number of factors including the inbound links. However the structure and content of the web page is still the most important criteria for deciding if a web page is a match for a certain search query. If you have no relevant keywords on your web page that indicate a connection to what the search engine user has typed in, there is no way for the search engine to figure out that your web page is a good match.
Even the other sites that link to you are likely to use the title of your page or any other keyword combination on your own pages to create the anchor texts. So using good keywords on your site is likely to improve the benefits from inbound links too.
Not doing keyword research can also cause your web pages not to have some of the very important industry specific words. A simple keyword research can easily uncover a large list of important keywords missing from your web page copy.
Basic, minimum, keyword research
Here is the least you can do... Brainstorm with a few other people and generate a number of keyword phrases that your customers may type in while searching on the Internet. Use a free keyword research tool (Google Keyword Tool, Word Tracker, Good Keywords, etc) to expand the list. For even better results use Keyword Strategy Studio to find hundreds of highly relevant keyword phrases.
Tweaking your web pages
- Always create a good web page title that has your primary keyword phrase in it.
- Use meaningful headings with the correct HTML tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) and have keyword phrases in them.
- Make sure that your web pages contain good information that makes sense to your site visitors.
- Have a meaningful meta description tag.
IM Toolpad includes a software called Website Explorer that allows you to check web pages for anchor texts, description tag, titles, headings etc. Use it to study and tweak your web pages.
