Keyword Research

The most important aspect of developing your Website should be the selection of the most relevant keywords and keyword phrases for your business or service.

A targeted keyword phrase is a search term of two or more words that you can reasonably expect someone to type into a search engine when they are looking for the product or service you provide. For example, if you offer residential real estate property services in the city of Chicago, then target keywords relating to Residential Property in Chicago. Such Keywords would be much easier to get high rankings with and they would also be in tune with what your potential customers are using as their search terms in the search engines. The results would not just get you high rankings, but higher sales conversions.

The best approach to keyword research is to select keywords with high efficiency i.e. selecting keywords that are popular yet less competitive.

How did you decide which keywords to focus on in your Website content? These keywords are vital to ensuring that people find you when searching the Web for relevant terms or phrases.

There are some other online tools to find top keywords related to your business.

Wordtracker lets you input a chosen keyword and then provides you with a list of alternative, related keywords.
Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool - Shows top queries related to the terms you input

Keyword frequency

This refers how much time a keyword appears in the page or in a section in the page. In general, more usage of keyword phrase in a page, more relevant it will be to that keyword phrase. You do not want to over use your keywords with frequency since many search engines will penalize you for the spamming of keyword stuffing if they judge that you were excessive. In general you can use your keywords in different areas in your page, and as many times as is suggested for that search engine.

Keyword density

This is the number of times your keywords appear in relation to the other words on your Web page. If your page only had one word of text, say "antiques", the keyword density would be 100%. If the only text on your page were "visit our antique bed center" Then the Keyword Density of "antique" would be 20% because each word on the page represents 1/5th of the entire text, or 20%

Keyword prominence

Prominence is how close to the beginning of the range the keyword appears. In general, a keyword which appears more close to the top of the page will get more relevancy.

Keyword proximity

Key word proximity refers to the distance in space, as measured in words, between two words or two key phrases. The proximity of a word or phrase in relation to each other and other key phrases is extremely important when determining how to use word combinations in page titles and page content.

Here is a good tool for measuring keyword proximity

Stop words

Stop words are general words and letters ignored by the majority of the search engines. For example:

a are and as be at for he from his I is in it of that on the they to this was

less usage of stop words helps to reduce the file size, and increase the speed and relevancy of the search results. As such, always try to utilize keywords instead of stop words as much as possible. Obviously, it perhaps a little more difficult to read, but it is worth the sacrifice, in the cause of trying to obtain a top search engine rankings.