Keyword Optimization Is Key to Effective SEO

Keyword optimization is a key factor in effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Choosing specific keywords to describe and identify your website and fine tuning those keywords to drive the greatest amount of traffic to your business is an art. Keyword selection is so critical to SEO success that many businesses hire an inbound marketing agency to ensure that their keyword list will have the impact they desire. Inbound marketing experts have the SEO, web analytics and HubSpot Keyword Grader expertise necessary to create a dynamic keyword list, track and measure the progress of each keyword, and tweak your keyword list regularly to most effectively meet your company's inbound marketing goals.

Keyword Strategy and SEO

Search engines rank sites using complex formulas that weight keyword prominence, frequency, density, proximity and placement. People often fail to give keyword selection the careful attention it requires. Poorly selected keywords that are not robustly related to your website will perform poorly, hurting your SEO ranking. Before investing time in SEO, take time to create an effective keyword list. 

To create an effective keyword list follow these steps:

1. Select keywords and keyword phrases. Read each page on your website and consider what it is about. Decide which words most accurately describe page contents. Consider the words a consumer is most likely to use to solicit that content. From your list, select one or two keywords per page and several less common words or phrases that might be triggered by multi-word searches.   
2. Sort by popularity. Using keyword grader and other web analytic programs, sort keywords and phrases by user popularity.
3. Tweak keywords and combinations of keywords in phrases to more closely match actual consumer use. Shuffle word combinations to achieve keyword phrases that resonate with consumers. Don't focus solely on the most common keywords in your business. Instead of trying to compete with top industry leaders for high rankings on the most frequently used keywords, improve your opportunity for SEO success by focusing on medium-use key words. Sometimes it's better to be a big fish in a little pond. Re-optimize pages to reflect keywords and keyword phrases.
4. Resort by popularity. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you achieve dependable results and periodically thereafter to maintain best SEO rankings.

What's your keyword strategy, and how well is it working?

Photo credit: ul_Marga