Maximize Your Website Investment with an Evolving Keyword Strategy

Maximize Your Website Investment with an Evolving Keyword Strategy

Are you getting the best return on your website investment? The answer is no if you’re not employing a keyword strategy that evolves as search engine search criteria evolve.

For keyword research, many SEO agencies use both the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and Google Keyword Analysis. But for effective optimization you have to do more.

Traditionally, to obtain higher rankings you’ll use the best keywords you’ve researched in the title, in the meta-tags and in the body text of your web pages. Five years ago keywords were more about meta-tags and language within the site. Today those things are still important, but back end linking, where quality web sites link back to your website, is of increasing importance.

Now, search engines like Google constantly change their criteria for high ranking sites, which means your site needs to be continually optimized. Since you never know directly what changes a search engine has made, many agencies have trouble keeping on top of developments. It’s like playing chess where you don’t see the moves of your opponent, only the results of his actions.

When asked about what aspects of keyword research have changed in 2008, our development director Anoop Rohera says, ‘I think the high competition and awareness of SEO benefits have made keyword research even more prominent in the overall SEO process. People spend more time researching keywords and trying to get a niche market by bidding on low competitive keywords and attempting to get a search engine place in a short time.’

So what techniques help you gather the data you need to keep up with search engine changes and maximize your ranking? Rohera says, ‘You can search manually for a number of popular keywords; reviewing the website title bar, the code and content to see what keywords are being targeted, and then analyze those keywords to see how many people are searching for them on a daily basis.’

Rohera continues, ‘Google and other big search engines always change their search criteria, or randomly change them so no method is overused. By using proprietary analytics to continuously evaluate your search results, we help solve this problem.’

I believe that having a competent and professional SEO firm looking after your site is critical. Many SEO companies ‘chew and screw’. What I mean by this is that they make some quick changes and move on to the next client. Good SEO is an on-going process that evolves over time and takes input from others.

So, what are the biggest changes that are going to affect the world of SEO over the next year? Rohera says, ‘Traditionally, most people stuff keywords in the content to get higher rankings. Search engines will penalize you for this nowadays. Link exchange techniques are obsolete too; search engines are giving increased weight to one-way links from quality websites, directories or forums. I think this will grow in the coming year as well. Other than this Google has also started rolling out universal search which means a search query will not just get links, but also images, news, videos and maps.’

– Nate Tennant, Kirk Communications