Keyword Analysis on my site

Now that you have tools set up it's time for some improvement. People search in many different ways. Some people search by keywords and some people search by phrases and some by questions. Each of these will provide a different result in Google. For example, suppose I want to make travel reservations to Cancun Mexico. I may try "cheap vacations to cancun" or "cancun vacations". In my example, vacationtours.com hits 178 position and the other 186th position. You need to decide how you want people to find your site.

Eliminate unrelated information

This should be the first step and webmaster tools can help you out and can be fairly easy to fix. For example, vacationtours.com had a blog program installed on the site. Once I installed webmaster tools, I discovered that a significant amount of keywords from the blog program and it's examples were indexed. Words like "b2evolution", "linkblog", "archives" and "yabba". Since the company was not using the blog, I uninstalled it. You can find out what keywords are on your site through the webmaster tools program on Google, select keywords. I'm sure Google also appreciates clean up efforts as do I.

Help with keywords.

So what keywords should I use. Fortunately there is a tool for this also. Google's adword campaign tool can help you out. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Use this keyword tool as a starting point. It will give you an idea of what keywords to use. If your a small business the more narrow focus you can get your keywords the more likely you are to get a hit. It hard to compete with Amazon if your selling books, or expedia for those in the travel business. Once you've got a list of keywords you might want to check the keywords against some trend data searches.

Searching Trend Data

Since google is in the search business, you would have to make assumptions they keep data about how people search. And your right. Google Trends can give you an idea on the different keywords people are searching on. It can actually be fun to play around with this tool, especially if you are interested in Politics. For instance, "Sarah Palin", former Governor of Alaska, wasn't really heard of until she became the Vice Presidential Nominee for the republican party. Type this into your browser and you will see what I mean. http://www.google.com/trends?q=sarah+palin&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 If your a travel business, trying to select a market you want to focus like destinations to Cancun, Cozumel, Aruba or Ixtapa, then trend data may be helpful.

Where do the keywords go?

Content. Content. Content. Sorry no tricks here. Meta tags don't play much of a role in googles searches. It's good to include the meta tags to help you think about what is the purpose of the page. But the content of the page needs to relate to the page. Your writing needs to be clear and match the title. Obviously the more content on the page, the more likely you are going to get a hit as long as it is relative to the topic.

What about url names?

It is best to match the url to the business or at the very least the page name. The more the name relates to the topic the more likely the hit is going to be. So if you don't have a domain name yet, you should consider naming your domain with relevant key words.

Other Areas for your keywords

Other areas to include your topic keyword is the page title and headers (h1, h2, h3). It is important to use the keyword appropriately, not scattered randomly around your page or the keywords hidden in your page. Make it relevant. You may be negatively hit for too much repeating.