KEYWORD RESEARCH

It’s absolutely critical that you research trusted data about what people are actually searching for in Google or Bing. All SEO work must be founded on actual facts, not assumptions, because often what you as a business owner understand about your product or service can be far different to how your clients think about it. The words they choose to use to search in Google with reflect these differences.

If you operate a website via a CMS (content management system) then you will probably have seen a section for every page called the “Keywords META”. In the past, you used to be able to add words in here that you wanted your website to show up for in Google or Bing. This data is no longer used by search engines, and it’s now largely meaningless. I recommend you leave this section empty. Don’t add any words even as a guide for yourself, because some smart competitor might even check yours out to get ideas about optimising their own site with them! The keywords META content is publicly visible on your website if you add this code: “view-source:” into your browser in front of the web address for any page in your site. Look for <meta name=”keywords” content=”some words in here”/> among the code. Yours should be empty in the content=”” section. Putting your keywords in there is NOT the place for adding your keywords.

Both Google and Bind provide keyword research tools to get statistics. I recommend Google’s tool within the Google Adwords account management site. This is free to use and you don’t have to run any paid campaigns through Adwords to be able to access it.

To get tips on how to operate the Google Adwords keyword tool or for more info on placing keywords into your website, visit https://crankedseo.com