I started paying attention to SEO for my site about two years ago. The first thing I did was try to refine my keywords, both for my content and my meta tags. I listed about 10 words that I thought people might search under when looking for the services I offer. I thought about the way I search when I look for something and I based my word and phrase choices on my own search habits. Then I took this list and went to a keyword suggestion tool. There are several out there, some free, some not. I like Submit Express and Overture, but look around, you might find ones you like better.
I went down my list, typing in each word, and taking the results and listing any that are relevant to my site and have decent searched for numbers. What’s decent? I’m looking for about 10 searches a day, but that doesn’t mean I ignore things on the list that come after that. If there are words that show up that only have a couple of hits a day, but seem very relevant to my content, I will still look into them.
After creating my new list, I examined each of the new words or phrases I came up with. I want to find niche keywords, that are searched for but not over saturated with competition. If I am selling hair bows, when I do a Google search for hair bows there are about 2,000,000 pages that come up (I know this because in the top right corner of a Google search it will tell you how many pages there are). That’s a lot for my small business to compete with. If I can refine my keywords I’ll have better luck showing up on the top of the of the search engines, while insuring that the keywords I’ve selected are actually searched for.
For instance, one of the keywords I found in my keyword search was boutique hair bows. If I consider my bows to be boutique hair bows, this may be a great niche phrase for me. I take my new lists, and start Googling each one. When I Google boutique hair bows I see that there are 717,000 pages that come up. I’ll have much better luck competing with 717,000 pages than I will with 2 million. I continue going through my new list this way, ideally I should be able to come up with 10 - 20 keywords and phrases that have about 500,000 pages in google. Now I have a great niche keyword list to work with!
