Choosing Keywords for Your Website

Choosing keywords is critically important before you ever begin building your website. You want to have at least 40-50 keyword phrases to make sure that your topic is broad enough to base a website on. By picking the most profitable keyword phrases, you can generate targeted traffic to your website.

In our last lesson on website content development, you learned how to research keywords to make sure that your website concept had the potential to be profitable. Expanding your keyword list will help you refine your website concept even more.

Keyword Ranking Tools

You can do in-depth keyword research yourself using the Search It tool, or you can use software to help you. Wordtracker is a good program to help you discover keyword profitability, but if you are really serious about building a website, I would recommend Site Build It.

Expanding Your Keyword List

For help in choosing keywords, you can use the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool. When the search box loads, type in your main keyword and click "Hit Me".

The keyword suggestion tool will return the results for your specific keyword, plus keyword phrases that are related to that term. Write down the keyword phrases that target your specific keyword phrase, plus the number of times that each was searched for.

Expanding Your Keywords

Choosing keywords that are very specific is the key to getting targeted traffic. Expanding your keywords will help you develop sets of focused keyword phrases. You can expand on the resulting keyword phrases by clicking on the search results returned from the overture page. This will give you related keyword phrases that target that phrase.

Using the word "cat" as an example, the keyword phrase "cat food" has a demand (number of searches in a month is 349), so we will expand on this. Here are the results when we click on the term cat food (showing only the top keywords and deleting terms that aren't relevant to our topic).

You can further expand your keyword phrases by clicking on each of the resulting keywords. For example, we expanded our cat food keywords to generate even more targeted keyword phrases. You can see the results here.

Using the above example to guide you, take each of your initial keyword phrases and research them further using the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. Record your results.

Finding Related Keywords

While you can easily identify the words that you would use when searching for information about your topic, this shouldn't be the only basis you use for choosing keywords. Other people may not use the same terms that you would when searching for information about your topic. This is why you need to research other phrases by using synonyms and related words.

Again, you can use the Search It tool. To find related keywords follow these steps:

Under Step 1 choose brainstorming from the drop-down menu.
Under Step 2 choose Thesaurus Synonym Generator from the drop-down.
Under Step 3 type in your first keyword phrase from your list.
Click the Search It button

Searching through the various synonyms will give you keywords that are related to your website concept. Using our "cat" example, you would find that these keywords are related to the "cat" concept keyword: feline, kitty, kitten, domestic cats, litter box, scratching post.

Take this list of related keywords and do a demand search using the overture suggestion tool in Search It. Be sure to expand the list by clicking on some of the results.

After you have found keywords related to your concept and researched the demand for them, add them to your list, along with how many times they are searched for. By now, you should have a pretty extensive list for choosing keywords.

Determining Supply For Your Keyword Phrases

Now you will need to determine how much competition there is for your various keyword phrases. Using the Search It tool again, follow these steps to find the competition for your keywords:

Under Step 1 choose competition from the drop-down menu.
Under Step 2 choose Google Single Keyword SUPPLY from the drop- down.
Under Step 3 type in your most searched for keyword.
Click the Search It button

As a special note, if you check the supply information directly from google.com without using Search It, put quote marks on either side of your keywords that you type into the goole.com search box. This will return results based only on those sites that provide the exact keyword phrase.

Do this research for each of your keyword phrases to find out how much competition there is for each specific keyword phrase. Record your results.

To show you how this works, we will use the "cat food" example to search for the competition for each of our keywords. Here are the results of our search for our cat food keyword phrases.

Calculating The Potential of Your Keywords

To calculate the potential of your keywords, you need to determine how much demand (from Wordtracker) there is in comparison to the supply (from google). This is where you break out the calculator.

For your first keyword phrase, divide the number in the demand column by the number in the supply column. This will give you a rough estimate of the potential for that keyword. You can multiply this number by 1000 so that your results are easier to analyze. Calculate the potential for each of your keyword phrases by dividing the supply by the demand, and put your results in the potential column.

Continuing with our "cat food" example from above, here is what the potential looks like for each of our example keyword phrases.

Choosing Keywords

As you look at the cat food keywords, you will notice something very interesting. While the potential for the main keyword phrase in each set is somewhat low, the potential generally goes up when the keyword phrase is more specific.

By choosing keywords that have the highest potential, you can pinpoint the specific topics that people are searching for. These very specific keyword phrases can then help focus your website concept, form the basis of your individual website pages, and help you choose the perfect domain name.

This exercise on choosing keywords probably seems like a lot of work, but don't rush ahead. Take the time to research the potential of all of your keyword phrases and related keyword phrases and record the results before moving on.

In our next lesson, we will use these specific keyword phrases to help determine the best domain name for your website concept.

Next: How to pick a great domain name
Previous: Website content development