The Essentials of Keyword Plannin'

Remember the web in the old days? You could cram in a bunch of keywords at the bottom of the page regardless of grammar, and pretty much devoid of any aesthetic sense, and search engines ate it up. It's probably a good thing those days are over because websites have become a lot more professional. That still doesn't mean that people are usin' keywords to the best of their advantage. In fact, because it is much harder to write keyword-targeted content, many site owners avoid the issue.

This is good news for anyone lookin' to improve their page ranking. The market is wide open for people who use an effective keyword strategy. The main issues are both quality and quantity. A few pages of keyword-driven content just aren't goin' to do it anymore. If you're really lookin' to improve your search engine rankin', and ultimately improve your sales, you have to provide dozens of pages of content.

To do so, you need to first research keyword strategies employed by competin' businesses. Type in the most obvious keyword for your industry. What comes out in the top ten? What have those sites done to achieve that rankin'? Keyword plannin' tools will tell you the popularity of certain keywords, but you should do some brainstormin' on your own. Try and think every possible permutation of a possible search, includin' misspellings—even for easy-to-spell words.

Each search engine will provide keyword plannin' tools, potentially for a fee—you can check the keyword relevancy in Google, Overture, Yahoo, and others. It's not a bad idea to check how keyword popularity compares in different search engines. You should be looking at potentially a hundred or more keywords—though this can vary accordin' to the site. If a site sells a variety of different products, or provides different services, you're goin' to be able to multiply that keyword list.

Each keyword list should be tailored to a specific demographic. Once you have the keyword list together, it is time to optimize content so that the site provides relevant content surroundin' that list of keywords. The most important part of content optimization is the title. What this means is you should title the article with a specific keyword in mind—the HTML link for the article is vital for page rank. This keyword should then be repeated in the article—but not so much that the text becomes unnatural or, worse, unreadable.

If that's the case, you could risk the site being banned by search engines outright. In addition to keyword popularity tools, you should also use keyword density tools for your site's content. If the keyword density is too high, the site could be red-flagged as offerin' unnatural, inorganic content. All of these issues are core to keyword plannin'.