Many people know the importance of SEO in increasing the visibility of websites in the search engines but may struggle with the process.

Like anything good SEO is a system. Follow the rules and you have a good chance of not only increasing the ranking but qualified traffic and thus conversion.

Search Engine Optimisation is split into two sections onpage and offpage work. Onpage work consists of finding the right keyword phrases clients or customers may be searching for to find a website, optimising the website for these keywords, and checking the website is search engine friendly. Off page work consists of building links from other websites back to the target website.

On Page

The first part of SEO is finding the right keyword phrases. This is where the business needs to think about their business goals. Who is your customer? is it B2B or customer related? Can customer’s order online? Do you only cover a specific area, local or national business?. Let’s look at a real life example. Say we run an IT Company in York. We provide IT Support, Maintenance, Server Maintenance, Remote Support, Network Support within the York area.

How would we find the correct keywords.

Google Keyword Toolbar – A great FREE resource by Google. Type in a keyword phrase and the search tool will come up with combinations along with the monthly searches the keyword phrase is searched for.

Here I typed in “IT Support York” and it provides a selection of 100 keyword phrases related to my search phrase. Looking down the list I see “computer support York”, “IT Support In York”,  ”York IT services”. all keywords have three columns dividing them. Competition the paid cpc competitors for this keyword phrase,  Global monthly searches (searches around the world), and local monthly searches (searches for that particular country according to country selected).

However before we get too excited about the local monthly search of 2,490 I must point out that this is based on a broad search match. For an explanation of Broad, phrase and exact match searches see here Comparing Broad, Phrase and Exact Match searches. I would recommend exact search match for SEO.

So basically you can select relevant keywords you like and download search volumes just for these keywords. I would recommend going through each of the product or services you are looking to optimize for and follow the above.

Spy On Your Competition

Another good idea is have a look at your competition. If you aren’t sure exactly who your competition is grab one of the above keyword phrases say “IT Support York” and look at the top ten competitors and look at what they are currently optimising their site for.  For example “IT consultancy York”, “Computer Support York”, “IT Solutions York”. Take a note of these and enter these in the Google keyword tool and see what the search volume is.

Other keyword tools which are completely free are market samurai an excellent resource for long tail keyword strategies (long tail keywords are keyword around four or five phrases long which are great at converting) and produces a rang of great features.

Google Insights For Search a brilliant tool that looks at the trends for search over a country, county, and city level. compare keywords against other keywords.

SEO Quake – Plugins into your web browser and allows you to view all the data of your competition at a glance. For example page rank, links, keyword density etc.

Keyword Selection is the foundation of SEO. Finding the right keywords for your business effects the rest of the your SEO plan. Choose the wrong keywords and you will end up attracting the wrong sort of customers.  However, taking the time to research, can unlock hidden gems, and increase the visibility of your site putting you in front of buying customers for your products or services.