1. Determine Keywords-Competitor's Sites and Google Searches
Put into Google search terms related to your business, its products and services. For each of the top five results on each search term, select the "View Page Source" option from your browser menu. Make a note of the keywords placed in the <TITLE>, <META NAME="Description">, and <META NAME="Keywords"> tags or use Abakus and enter competitors websites.
Tool: http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html
List these on the Keyword Competitiveness spreadsheet.
2. Identify Related Keywords
Tool: http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/
Start determining phrases that pay where demand is relatively high but competition relatively weak. Underexploited keyphrases.
Now return to top 5 competitor's sites and use the abakus to analyze two, three and four word keyphrases.
ideally you want a list of around 100 keywords and keyphrases at this stage.
ALWAYS PLURALIZE YOUR KEYWORDS WHERE YOU CAN.
3. Keyword Attractiveness
A. Keyword Popularity
We have at our disposal the highest-quality market research data that has ever been made available, continually refreshed in real-time and based on massive market samples. We must take advantage of it.
Tool: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion
This information is from the past month-bear in mind for seasonal products.
add these keywords to Column A in the spreadsheet.
B. Keyword Competitiveness
Do a Google search on the search terms concerned. Return to the spreadsheet and look at Column F "Raw Competition". Perform a search on Google for each of your listed keyphrases in turn and enter the number of results into your spreadsheet.
Column G is for directly competing sites. Those that have exact keyword phrases you are analyzing in the anchor text (the text the user clicks) of links to their site from other websites (rather than simply having the words in that phrase on their pages).
Directly competing sites are your serious competition.
To determine Column G for any search phrase, use the allinanchor: Google operator.
Perform an allinanchor: search on Google for each term in turn and enter the number of results into the spreadsheet in Column G.
To spped up your extraction of Google search results numbers, you may wish to make use of:
Tool: http://www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp
C. Keyword Opportunity Index (KOI)
The keyword effectiveness index (KEI) first popularized by Sumantra Roy, is a way of combining keyword popularity with raw keyword competitiveness to give a composite score. The usual formula is popularity squared, divided by the number of competing sites using that keyword.
The keyword opportunity index (KOI) is a more sophisticated measure of the opportunity presented by each keyword. It bases the attractiveness of a keyword or keyphrase solely on directly competing sites.
4. Keyword Deployment
Whether you are building links, choosing domain names, or writing page text, you are trying to include your keywords in all of these in a search-engine-friendly sort of way.
Keyword Prominence-Prominence implies that a word used at the beginning of a link or piece of text is more important than the rest. i.e. Break up your text in sub-headings (all of which use the <h1> tag) and the search engine will attach a prominence value to the first words of each of these in turn
Keyword Proximity-Refers to how close the keywords that make up your keyphrase are to each other. Keep your keywords together as a unit.
i.e. Consider:
-Printing Business Cards & Letterheads
-Business Card Printing & Letterhead Printing
While the first option is perhaps more elegant English, the second will produce better rankings for a page optimized on either "business card printing" or "letterhead printing" as the relevant words appear next to one another and in the correct order.
Keyword Density-The relative frequency with which a keyword or keyphrase is found within the page text area being examined (whether it is a title, heading, link anchor text, or page text). Density is calculated as the number of words in the keyphrase multiplied by the frequency with which they occur together, and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword).
Tool: You can search a single site with Google using site:randyelrod.typepad.com culture
