SEO Must #2b: Brainstorming For Keywords

Brainstorming for keywords is the process of gathering candidates for keywords and keyword phrases. One place to find such keywords is off the top of your head. There are other places you can look for keyword phrases too. Here are a few.

Where to look

  • Off the top of your head
  • Your website
  • Websites of competitors
  • Amazon reviews of books related to your content
  • Correspondence written to you from readers and/or customers.
  • Suggestions from friends

Off the top of your head

This will be one of your easiest and most fruitful places to find keywords — assuming of course that you are creating a website with content related to something you are familiar with. If you are creating a website on a topic about which you know nothing then skip this section and jump down to “websites of competitors.” Otherwise, spend a little quality time with yourself jotting down all the keywords that relate to your websites topic and/or topics.

Your website

If you have an existing website, then definitely mine it for keywords. Read through your pages jotting down words that jump at you. If you want to get more detailed use a word frequency counter. The writewords.org website is designed for writers. I would guess to make um, sure that um, they are um not using um certain um words to um much in their writings. Is a nice tool. You can copy the content from your page and just paste it into the appropriate box. Who knows you might even want to learn a thing or two about writing in general while you are there — but later. Just bookmark it for now. Keep in mind you are on a keyword hunt.

Websites of competitors

Might as well use this valuable resource to help you locate keywords that you may otherwise not think of. If you don’t know who your competitors are, then do a quick google search and go visit them — it’s about time.

Amazon reviews of books/products related to your content

If you know of books and/or products related to your website topic(s), then look on Amazon.The first place to start is on the search results page. Glance at the array of suggested answers to your search, look in the descriptions, jot down any keywords that jump out at you. Next, look at a product page or two. In the review section (toward the bottom of the page) you will find reviews — some of which are written by real people with real interest in the product. See what keywords they drop in their review.

Correspondence written to you from readers and/or customers.

If you have correspondence from existing readers and/or customers you are in luck. Look to see what they say. “Hey Joe, do you have a blank blank in stock.” This tells the keywords that at least one person uses to reference your products. So mine these correspondences.

Suggestions from friends, family, coworkers

Too many people ignore this useful resource. Whether from embarrassment or not wanting to impose, get over it and get on with it. Let these good people help you with your project. Later you are going to ask them to review your website in detail. So there is no time like the present to get them involved — not just through emotional support, but as part of the team.

How to look

Choose your keywords carefully. Turn up your attention. Bring yourself into present time. And, focus.

Be specific, be direct, be honest. Tricking potential readers to your website is not the way to start a fruitful relationship with someone.

Remember, keywords can be a single word or short phrases. A two or three word combination can be very
effective — actually essential.

Keep a look out for colloquial terms — characteristic of or appropriate to ordinary or familiar conversation rather than formal speech or writing; informal. Ordinary and familiar sounds like pretty good idea when hunting up terms that normal folks will use in looking for your content.

Write down every relevant keyword and keyword phrase you find. You will trim the list later. So don’t hesitate to include a work or phrase. This is brainstorming — so don’t be too restrictive. You can always delete insignificant keywords later.

Think like a customer or website visitor. Listen like a webmaster, but think like a customer or visitor.

Next to come is Organizing Your Keywords and Expanding Your Keywords.

SEO Must #2a: Know your keywords

Keywords have to be one of the trickier parts of this SEO business. And one of the more neglected.

Why are keywords so important? Because, keywords are used by search engines to facilitate fetching results for an online searches.

There are two basic approaches to dealing with keywords.

  • Approach 1 — ignore keywords entirely. Create your website by generating content without worrying about keywords. Just do whatever it is you do. If you happen to be selling zen meditation productions, just write about your zen meditation products and let the chips fall where they may.
  • Approach 2 — deliberately and voluntarily determine which keywords relate best to your content and will bring in users to view said content.

There is something to be said for the ignore keywords approach. If you don’t really know what you are doing the effort to monkey around with keywords might be so off-putting that you give up on the whole idea of doing a website in the first place. In that case it might make sense to just do your website, create the best content you can and worry about keywords later.

But then again there is much to be said for getting it right in the first place. If you have an existing website then it is about time to start the process of getting it right. If you are just starting to build your website, it is definitely worth the time to investigate keywords.

Picking keywords requires combining several factors. Two important factors are:

  • Which keywords best represent your website content
  • Which keywords do real people use in real searches

Both of the above must be taken into account. If you have a website devoted to finding, curing, or preventing disease in fish then the keywords “piscis” and “morbus” would represent your website content. However, given that most people don’t use latin when doing a search, it might be better to use “fish” and “disease” as your keywords.

Your first task it to use your wit and wisdom to make your best guess at a few keyword phrases that will both represent your website and actually be used in real world searches.

After you have a set of best guess keywords, it will be time to poke around in Google’s Adword  Tool Kit to refine your keywords.

See SEO Must #2b: Brainstorming For Keywords for the next step in this process.