SEO Warrior

Chapter 11. Keyword Research

Although the old days of keyword stuffing are long gone, keywords and keyword research are essential to SEO. In a search engine context, keywords are the words or phrases someone types into the search engine search box to obtain relevant results. Search engines rely on keywords in their search engine ranking algorithms. Keywords indicate relevancy.

As you saw in Chapter 5, keywords are used just about everywhere. In terms of websites, keywords are words or phrases found in your web pages, site and page URLs, and so forth. Before you plow into the world of keyword research, you should have a clear strategy. Targeting one- or two-word keywords may not work as expected due to too much competition.

Picking the right combination of words is important. Search engines have begun to pay attention to page–copy word relationships. With that in mind, it is important to understand the topics of keyword stemming, keyword modifiers, and latent semantic indexing to make intelligent keyword decisions.

Keyword research activities are part of a multistep iterative process. This process usually starts with a keyword brainstorming session, closely followed by utilization of keyword research tools. Some tools are free and some are commercially available. In this chapter, we will examine several popular keyword tools, including the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter Labs. No tool is perfect, so it is important for you to get familiar ...