Keywords For SEO Rankings

Does this work? Well, are you reading this? How did you happen to come by this lens? What keywords did you look for when you began your search today? If you are like me at all, and you want people to see your content, then you need to get them to your lens using fresh and original content that is highly optimized in order to make it's way to the top of the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Well, in order to do this, you must learn how to identify the right keywords before you write your content so you can structure the content accordingly and fit your keywords in without it seeming to forced and unreadable.

To provide good flow for your readers is to provide a good feeling of having a superior product and you really know what you are talking about. Oh yeah, make sure you remain consistent by continuing to update your content as much as possible and remain ethical by staying involved in online forums, communities and make comments on other sites that are well thought out and stand a good chance of creating dialog.

Keyword research involves identifying a resource to finding the right keywords. When you look for keywords think of what someone would type into to Google or Yahoo in order to find you. Put yourself in their shoes. This is a great starting point.

Before going on to actually researching your keywords you need to perform a couple exercises to help you prepare. First, write down about 20 keywords that you feel are relevant to your topic, blog or business. Second, identify a keyword search tool (many tools offer free options so make sure to check for that) such as Google keyword tool, Wordtracker or another resource designed to generate keyword or keyword phrases (known as long-tail keywords) based on one or more keywords you enter. This helps to get some ideas on keywords you may have forgotten to think about. Third, save the keywords on a word doc or notepad to make them easily accessible in the future.

Now that you have identified a good keyword resource, found good keywords and keyword phrases and saved them for easy access when you need them, it's time to check out your competition. Take each of your keywords and go to a couple different search engines and perform a search. Notice what comes up on the first page of the serp (search engine results page). These are your competitors.

Now take some time and look at the top four of five sites. What you want to look for are the keywords they are using and check them against the keywords you have. You will no doubt get some more great ideas. Take the new keywords and run them through your keyword resource tool to find out a little more information about them.

When you run keywords through the keyword resource tool, select the keywords that have a high ranking, but are not associated with high competition. Look for the keywords that are generated that have low and medium competition versus the terms that are highly competitive. Re-run your keywords again and come up with a list you feel is going to work. Remember, you can always change these. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend doing this multiple times in order to stay on top of the latest trends.

Tip: If you are focusing in a certain area, add a location to each of your keyword phrases and that will drill down on the competition even further. This is a sure-fire way to dominate local search engines inquiries. The more specific, the less competition you will have. (i.e., instead of keyword phrases, make it "your city name" keyword phrases).

What happens once you have your keywords ready to go? Make sure you add keywords within the content of your article(s) you are submitting, blog(s), or website(s). Often times, there are clear areas made available to add "tags" to your content that will help the web crawlers identify your keywords.

If you are not a web savvy person, like most of us, and don't know any special HTML coding or programming, simply provide the list of keywords to your web designer and ask him to add them to your meta-tags. In addition, make sure to create a keyword specific description of your website and add that to your meta-description.

According to Google, the title tag should =63 characters with spaces, the meta-keyword tags =256 characters with spaces and the meta-desctription =156 characters with spaces. Google will crop anything more than that with a few exceptions once in a while to finish off a sentence.

Now you have some of the parameters to start building a business while having a life, get started and feel the excitement of submitting your content. It's a good feeling to have people read your thoughts and ideas. If you are lucky enough, perhaps they'll learn something.

Thanks!