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Basic SEO tips: Keyword Analysis

Keyword analysis and keyword strategy are the foundation of SEO. They are the starting point for everything, and targeting the wrong keywords can be the difference between having zero or thousands of visitors coming to your site on a daily basis!
Here are the few basic steps to follow when picking your keywords.

1. Think about it

It sounds pretty obvious, but some people will hear about some fancy keyword tool (some are listed below) and will start using those right away. Take the time to think about your business first:

The answers to these questions should help you come up with a list of 30 to 50 words that will be used in your keywords.
Remember: when we talk about "keywords", we really mean key phrases. Actually, keywords should never be one word only, but 2, 3 or 4 words long; never more than 5. All the words you can think of that are relevant to your services, products, location, specialty, etc... should be combined to try and form good keywords. Try to think about your niche market, and what type of words your customers are more likely to type on Google when looking for services/products you offer.

2. Keyword popularity

Once you have a list of keywords you think might be good, it is time to use some of those keywords tools to get more ideas, and verify which ones actually are good keywords. There are a lot of those tools around but we will give you a couple that are most easy to understand and use.

You probably know which of your competitors are popular and have really good websites. They probably rank well for very relevant keywords, and you can see which ones by using the SpyFu tool.
You can also use Soovle and start typing words you think apply to your site; the tool will give you the most popular searches around this word for several Search Engines.
You should end up with a list of about 20 to 30 strong potential keywords. Use the Google Keyword Tool to check the popularity of each one of them. If all the data you get seems too overwhelming, just pay attention to the Global Monthly Search Volume; the bigger the number, the better. However, the most popular keywords are more likely to be the most competitive as well. For that reason focus on mid-range keywords; the little green bar for Advertiser Competition is also a good indicator of low competitiveness.
Of course, avoid keywords that return a "Not Enough Data" result; since no one is searching for those, it might be easy to rank well on Google for them, but it won't help your site to be found!

As a general rule, especially when you start SEO on a site, you want to go for keywords that are Long Tail keyword. You can find a good explanation of what those are here.

3. Keyword competitiveness

You should also pay attention to how competitive each keyword is.
A simple way to do so is do a Google search for each one. On the results page, in the top right corner it will tell you how many other pages are indexed for this keyword. The higher the number, the more competition you have!

Also take a look at all the sites that appear on the first page of results for this keyword; once you have mastered the basics of SEO, you will be able to see the difference between a site that has been optimized and one that has not. If all the sites on the first page look properly optimized you might have a hard time competing with them to get a good ranking.
If none or few of them look like they've had some SEO work done, it might actually be fairly easy for your site to rank pretty high in the results!

4. Keyword efficiency

An easy way to compare your potential keywords against each other is to calculate their Keyword Effectiveness Index, or KEI.
The easiest and most simple formula for KEI is KEI = (P^2/C) where P is the Popularity of the keyword (Global Monthly Search Volume), and C its competitiveness (number of indexed pages in Google results). There are actually a lot of nuances about KEI that you don't need to know when learning the basics of SEO; for a complete explanation though, you can read this page

At the end of the process, you should decide on 3 to 5 final keywords; this is a pretty decent number of keywords for a first time basic optimization and should be enough for you to work with.
If you are offering services or products locally, use a geographical word in, at least, one of your keywords (name of your city, region, county, state, nearest big city, etc…)

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