Keyword Brainstorming

Five Easy steps to creating a keyword list.

You know you need keywords in your website, both for the search engines to index, and also for your users so they see the words they are looking for that convince them they have landed in the right place for their needs.

Your keyword list should be in place BEFORE you design your website.

Why?


Because those keywords, and where they are included in your site, can affect how your site is built.

However, it is likely that you already have a website, and that you had no keyword list available when it was built. Or if you did, perhaps your keyword list needs updating and hence your site needs to include the new keywords and phrases.

So, how do you find your keywords?

Here is a step by step process to a keyword brainstorm. Whether you have a website or are in the process of designing, or redesigning, you need a keyword list.

You don't need to do these in order, you just need to do each step to create a comprehensive list.

Step 1: Out of your own head
Get a nice, clean piece of paper, a pen, (or create a spreadsheet), make a coffee/tea/hot chocolate, and sit somewhere quiet. (Turn off the radio, TV, phone, kids etc!). Now, think about your business and start writing. You want every word and phrase you can possibly think of that anyone wishing to find you might consider to search on.

Name of business, location/address, products it sells, who it sells to, product codes or brands (if global or well known eg iPod shuffle, Nokia, N95, etc). Uses of your products eg in the health service, for education, bed & breakfast toiletries, listen to music - whatever uses your products have, think of them and write them down.

What questions might people ask about your products or services? "Who promotes websites?" for instance. Or, "What is the battery life of an Ipod?" "How does no win, no fee work?" "How do I stop my home being repossessed?" etc etc etc.

Think of any organisations or trade bodies you are a member of, and write them down. This can include Breakfast Clubs like BNI, or online networking sites (from Ecademy to facebook) - everyone with whom you may be associated.

Do your products involve a particular technology? Write down all the words you can think of to do with that.

Is there specific jargon for your industry? Write down as many terms as you can think of.

Are there any common mispellings associated with your products and services? eg acomodation. Write down any you can think of.

Log on to your website, and work through it carefully reading every word. It is amazing how many keywords you will find on your existing website that you may have overlooked. And don't forget to do "View, Source" in your browser. That will let you look at the lines of code behind your website.

At the top of each page you should find META DATA. That is code that a good website designer will include in your site to help the search engines rank your site. It looks like this:

Due to blogger restrictions, I have replaced < or > with ..
..title..Keyword brainstorm for perfect search engine optimisation../title..

..meta name="description" content="How to choose the right keywords and phrases for your website optimization" /..

..Meta name="keywords" content="keywords, phrases, search engine optimisation, search engines, optimization, article, help, find, brainstorm, website, ranking, rank, SERP, search postion, meta data, meta tag, keyword, content, description etc etc etc"..

Nick the keywords out of there too. (We'll show you how to make sure that each page of your website is optimised so that these keywords in your meta data have the right weighting in your visible text another day!)

You should also find keywords behind your images, in what are known as the ALT IMG text, or longdesc (long description) text. Look for ..alt img=".....".. in the source code of the pages, or hover over an image and see what the little box says. (N.B. This will only work in Firefox if the site designer has included a ..title.. in the alt img text, so if you don't see a box when you mouse over an image, you will need to scroll through the source code of the page. If this is too complex, don't worry too much. Most people completely forget alt img text when building or optimising a site - more fool them!

Ok, how we doing? Got a full page of A4 yet? You should have.

Step 2: Friends & Family, Colleagues & Customers
Use the resources around you for free ideas. Ask all of the above to offer keywords about your business. Invariably they will come up with all sorts that you may have missed. Your customers are quite important in this process, as they will give you a good idea of what terms other potential customers may consider when trying to find you and your products.

You can ask your customers quite easily, without it seeming like you have suddenly lost all your marbles! If they phone asking for a catalogue, or to place an order, ask them at the end of the call what words or phrases they associate with you and your business.

And don't forget to ask them how they found your website either whilst you have the opportunity!

Step 3: Competitive Analysis

Next, we are going to look at which keywords and phrases your competitors use. After all, they are in the same market as you so inevitably will have used many of the keywords you need to include in your brainstorm.

If you have no idea who your competitors are, tut tut! If you do, then log onto their websites, and scan their sites for words of use to you. Check their meta tags as well.

Then, Google a few of the phrases you think your potential customers are most likely to use, and investigate the websites that those terms bring up.

Inevitably, you may find that other industries also use the same terms for different purposes, in which case make a note to yourself that this is the case. If you can make a strategic partnership with the top sites in the other sector, you can divert any traffic who has, because of the duplicate meanings of the terms, accidentally landed on their site back to you.

Right, now you have nicked all your competitors' keywords, and found many from friends, your own head, customers etc, let's see whether other people globally use them.

Step 4: Use keyword tools online
Now you have a fairly reasonable list of words, let's try a few online tools to see what else you can discover.

First up is WORDTRACKER.
This is without a doubt, looking at its Alexa ranking, one of _the_ top keyword sites on the Net now. We have used it since it was launched. Try the free trial, and then make the most of its cost-effective subscription based model because the more words you can lay your hands on that are highly used, the better for you, your site and the visitors you are trying to attract.

Using Wordtracker is easy, and there are plenty of instructions on the site to learn how to use it in a matter of moments.

Don't forget when using Wordtracker to note how many searches, or the popularity, of each term. This is useful info to get visitors.

Google Adwords offers another tool for finding keywords. Sign up for a free account, then under Tools, you will find the Keyword Tool. This will give you plenty of ideas about top searched keywords you can include in your text, metas, etc.

Overture (once upon a time called Goto and now owned by Yahoo) also offers a free keyword tool.

There are more free keyword tools. You can search for them if you choose to keep extending your list....

Ok, how we doing? A few pages now one hopes, of those all important keywords and phrases.

And finally, Step 5: your website traffic stats

You should have traffic stats for your website. These show how people have found your site (search engines, links etc), where they come from, how long they stay, which pages they visited, and may tell you far more depending on which package you are using. It could be sitemeter, Webtrends, Webanalyzer, or one of many others. This is the most important information you have about your website.

You need to access your stats and find keywords by looking for 'referrals'. It may be hidden under another heading like 'search engine keywords'. What you are looking for is information about which keywords your visitors typed into the search engines which led them to visit your website.

It will surprise you no doubt to find that some terms have actually led to your site. If you run a Bed & breakfast and discover that for some bizarre reason "womble porn" leads to your site, then brighten up your day by writing down the most obscure ones and pinning them to your office wall! And once you have done that, write down all the keywords and phrases which have led people to your site over the last week, month or year, depending on how much data you have on this.

We could suggest 10 or more other places to look for keywords (The thesaurus on [Open] Office Word, blogs, forums, etc etc), but that's enough for starters.

So, you are done!

And I bet your coffee/tea/hot chocolate is cold, or possibly even days old, so make a new one and then ponder the words on that list.

How many of them are quite surprising? Expected? Lead to places you hadn't expected when you googled them? Unthought of by you previously? Definitely (not) included in your website? Highly competitive? Bring in lots of (unexpected) traffic?

This exercise on its own should open your eyes to popular keywords, what your competitors are doing, terms you may not have considered for your niche, or terms that mean something else entirely when you look on the Net. Sometimes, you may be using what you feel is a barely used, industry specific term and find it leads to sites in a different sector with large budgets who you have no chance of competing against.

We have a client who discovered a term they thought was very specific to their sector was actually up against the adult entertainment industry - the experts of search engine optimisation and capturing traffic. And that this had led to the client experiencing high traffic and visitor numbers on their website but very few sales. It didn't take long to rebrand the product and change the keywords associated with it and pull in a qualified audience who were actually interested in the client's products and not fetishes!

Anyway, now you have your keywords, the next step is to prioritise them into the order of importance for your potential visitors and then ensure that they are included in your website.

Tomorrow is another day. And it would be good if for now you just let that keyword list you have created have a time to mature. And for you to think about the implications of what you have discovered through creating it.