Keyword research is the basis and foundation of all your Search engine optimisation efforts, if you choose the wrong keywords or keyword phrases to target then you could be wasting your time and search engine optimisation efforts.

If you knew that 90% of all keywords used get next to no traffic you would start to think more seriously about how you research and target your keywords to ensure you get the best return for your investment of time and money for your website.

It is estimated that 50% of keyword searches in the search engines are made just once, now it would not be worth the time it takes to rank for this keyword phrase if you only get one visitor from it, obviously there are exceptions and we all know that every visitor is a potential customer and spending some time and money to get that customer is worth it over the life of the customer but statistically you need to attract hundreds or thousands of visitors with each of the keywords each month.

For your keyword research to be effective you need to think about what people who are looking for your goods or services would put into the search engines in order to find you. You then need to take these phrases and check how many of the people using the internet have searched for these phrases over the past month.

Remember that the number of people looking for 0800 numbers, that is the UK free phone number could be more or less than the number of people looking for the artist Jack Vettriano that does not mean that one term is better than the other if your business is related to phone numbers in the UK then 0800 numbers is more relevant to your telephone business, where as if you have an art gallery or produce art prints then Jack Vettriano artist is a much better term to promote his art work for.

So you need to consider both relevancy and visitor numbers along side the competition levels when you are completing your keyword research.

When thinking about your linking strategy there are some things you need to consider, are your links properly formatted? are you pointing them to the best pages of your site? are you buying links and is it going to be obvious to Google that is what you are doing?

If for example you were running a cottage holidays website in the South of England, a place where people could come and choose a cottage to stay in for a week or two, how do you avoid being spotted for buying links, some of the give always are that the text on the page has nothing to do with holidays, cottages or the locations that you serve.

The techniques used in linking from high PR pages to other sites worked 2 or 3 years ago and are still of some value but may harm you if one of your competitors tells Google that you are buying links and Google investigates then they could all be discounted, and this is a waste of money.

So what you want in a link? The link needs to come from a page with relevant text, Page Rank is much less important than relevance of the text that is on the page, also the links to your site need to be spread across the site, so that internal pages also have links to them. You need to avoid site wide links as they can appear unnatural, a variety of link text should also be used when linking to the site, so the link text for search engine optimisation Salisbury goes directly to a page about search engine optimisation in Salisbury.

It should be the goal of the site to rank well for 2 – 3 terms per page of the site, the home page should also not rank for more than 2 – 3 terms, otherwise the page begins to look and feel unfocused.

I would also suggest that you undertake some detailed keyword research into various terms that could bring you in more traffic, there are always terms that have been overlooked by your competition, just think, if you rank well for 50 phrases that bring in 500 visitors each a month that is much better than ranking for 2 phrases that bring in 10,000 visitors a month, and the competition is likely to be much less.

The SEO should be an ongoing and ever changing process so that it encompasses the changes in the search engines algorithms but also the changing needs of the company as you grow different keywords will become more relevant and the SEO needs to be flexible enough to incorporate these changes.

Staying at the top of the search engines

It is one thing to get great rankings and be at the top of the search engines for your chosen key words and phrases, you need to be able to stick to the top results when you get their.

The first step is to understand why you have been so successful with achieving these results for your keywords so far.

Remember if you do not know why you have done well you will find it harder to repeat in the future for your next keyword.

Once you have identified the reason for your success you can look at your competitors to see how they are doing, if they are not following your strategy and are not challenging your position then move on to your next keyword but keep an eye on them.

If they are nipping at your heels then you need to increase your marketing to ensure you keep ahead of them.

Getting to and staying at the top of the search engines needs to be your goal and using the help of a search engine optimisation company such as us can be the most cost effective way of getting there.