Parsing Keywords for SEO

Posted by Web Guru

May 16, 2007

As you probably know by now, keyword research is the key, pun intended, to getting rankings that produce traffic for your site. That being said, not all keywords carry the same value. Just to make sure we are on the same page, let’s run through keyword research real quickly. Keyword research is simply the task of identifying what your prospects are typing into search engines to find things within your niche. You can sites such as Wordtracker to do this. Most sites make a major mistake when doing keyword research. The take the correct initial step of developing a large list of keyword phrases. The problem is they then fail to parse their keywords. Instead, they simply prioritize based on the total traffic produced by a phrase or by how easy it will be to get ranked for a particular phrase. If you want to make hay through search engine optimization, you need to parse the keyword phrases you find in your research. What does parse mean? It means you need to categorize the phrases by the likelihood someone using them will actually buy. Let’s take a closer look. The first category to be parsed is the browser phrases. Who, why, articles, information…all these words are indicative of a person that is looking for something within your niche, but probably is not red hot to break out the credit card and make a purchase. These people are just browsing, which means these phrases should get a low priority in our seo efforts. Yes, people coming to your site through rankings for them might buy later, but then again they may not. The second category to be parsed are people with problems. These phrases tend to have words such as how in them. A person searching for”>The third category to be parsed is the ready to buy phrases. Words to look for include buy, purchase, cheap and so on. Basically, you are looking for a “give it to me now, dammit” type of theme. For example, a person searching for “buy a repair kit for leaky faucet” is someone ready to pay you money. Your conversion rate on such traffic should be tremendous assuming you are offering a reasonably priced solution. As you can guess, these keywords should be the first that we focus on when optimizing the pages of our site.

Keyword research is obviously critical to your success in seo. That being said, take the time to exam your keyword list and emphasize the phrases that are going to lead to sales. Your goal is to maximize sales, not necessarily traffic.

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