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Here’s the third in our series of articles on SEO basics, geared towards those readers who know little to nothing about SEO, ranking on the search engines and other such topics. These articles aren’t meant to be a full SEO course; they are simply here to educate you about basic SEO and what it does for a website.

Now, on to keyword research! Yes, its about as exciting as it sounds. Nevertheless, this boring little term is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. There are many ways to do keyword research and a lot of complexities involved, but here’s a simple look at the process.

The keyword phrase is the set of words a visitor types in when they query a search engine. It is important to note that search engines look for the exact keyword phrase typed in by the user when determining relevant results.

Therefore, changing the order of the words will bring up different results.

For example, Los Angeles web design brings up different results than web design Los Angeles. There’s a lot to consider when choosing keywords; if you do everything else right, but optimize for the wrong keywords, you’ll see few results.

So how do you do it correctly?

One, figure out which pages you want to optimize for and guess a bunch of phrases for each page. Think about which people you want to find your site. Make specific list of the different types of customers you want to bring to your site through the search engines.

Two, use a keyword research tool to determine exactly what phrases internet visitors are typing in, how many people (traffic) are searching for those words, and how many documents those keywords return.
Guess a few keyword phrases for each group. After your initial guess you’ll want to do the research to figure out what people are actually typing in.

You can optimize different pages of your website for different keywords. SO you should research three to four different keyword phrases for each individual page of your website.

Third, analyze the quality of the competition and refine target keywords.

It is important to note that the depth of the search does not correspond to traffic levels. If you search Google for “random white socks” it brings up over three million documents. All three million documents are competing for the same results, or search engine rankings. But very few people actually type in “random white socks;” this is an example of a search with high depth, but low traffic, so this probably isn’t a good keyword phrase to optimize for.

Also, think about the content on the pages and remember that optimizing a page for keywords that aren’t directly related to the content of the individual page is considered spam and can get you penalized.

Try to ensure all the keyword phrases apply to the same subject or topic on each of the individual pages on your website. For example, don’t try to optimize a single page for both dogs and computer equipment.

Please see the first two articles in the series for more information about basic SEO:

What is a Search Engine? - SEO Basics Part 1

What is Search Engine Optimization? SEO Basics Part 2

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