While there are numerous other SEO drivers (such as inbound marketing, relevance and authority and PPC), keywords are still important.
However, picking your keywords and flooding your communications with them does have drawbacks.
The problems are obvious:-
- search engines are very sophisticated and don’t like be fooled
- customers want regular added value updates – they don’t want to read the same keywords over and over again
The following criteria will help you select the right keywords, which should:-
- have sufficient volumes (number of people using them to look for products in your business sector)
- be relevant to your business
- give you a) competitive advantage b) profitability of the services/products linked in with the keywords.
As a word of caution, remember big money/trophy keyword phrases are the hardest to gain ranking spots as they are the most competitive.
So be creative.
All search terms have variations – related modifiers should make your text feel natural while subtly covering a variety of keyword options.
Common variations include:-
- singular versus plural
- alternative word order
- synonyms and acronyms
- keyword modifiers
Although keyword phrases are the initial building blocks, it is a site’s ‘authority/relevance’ that creates a highly visible online presence and drives the traffic you want to you.
Generally, on-page optimisation creates relevance while in-bound links generates authority while external (in-bound) links from other sites are the single most powerful ranking tool amongst search engines today.
There are three key factors influence the latter:-
- the number of links to a site, where generally more is better…
- the number of links to a specific page which will be ranked in terms of a question asked
- anchor texts (the clickable text of a link) connects to specific questions
Link building tactics divide into three areas:-
- ‘manual’ (achieved technical activity such as comments, social networking)
- ‘editorial’ (building relationships and third party endorsement with the goal of achieving unprompted high value links)
- ‘combo’ of the two.
The greater your relevance and authority, the more you will gain from your investment in strategic copywriting.