A Rose By Any Other Name – Is A Different Search Phrase
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
That’s a little speech given by Juliet to convince Romeo that that names were artificial meaningless conventions. Well Julie, in today’s world if you were trying to find Romeo’s Facebook page you’d have to enter “Romeo Montague Facebook” into Google even though you think of him as your Italian Stallion. In other words, Google will return exactly what you ask for and Italian Stallion might return some exciting results but it won’t get you Romeo’s page. So what’s the lesson here for you and your new Flash website?
Julie tried finding Romeo by entering “Italian Stallion” because that’s the way she thought of him. Obviously Julie was disappointed with the results. Don’t make the same mistake of optimizing for a keyword that you think is appropriate without checking to see if anyone else is actually looking for it. In other words, you need to enter the wonderful world of keyword research.
The Grunt Work That Keeps On Giving
Despite what you might hear from the gurus, keyword optimization is not an exact science. The reason that there isn’t one set of hard and fast rules that work is simply because Google keeps changing the way it evaluates returns. However if you’re new to this game there are some basics that you should keep in mind and at least have a working knowledge of the subject. Ideally you want to target a page for a keyword that has reasonable search traffic (5,000 searches or better per month) and weak site competition on the first page of Google.
So how do you find the best keywords that will make a website indexed by Google, and discovered by your ideal audience? Some work, and the help of some tools. There are dozens of search tools available - both free and paid programs - but for now we’ll just look at a couple of popular free methods:
Google AdWords is one of the best known and most used keyword research tools on the internet. Essentially you load in your base keyword and it returns related keywords along with the number of searches per month. In addition it gives you a graphic display of the trend for that keyword which let’s you see the interest in the word over time. You’ll also see a column for “competition” but that is really talking about how strong the competition is for AdWord ads assigned to that keyword; it has nothing to do with the competition of the sites on the first page.Let’s say you are a dog lover and your site is about how to treat dog ailments at home. When you go to Google AdWords you might start your search with “home treatment for dogs” and quickly discover that there is very little in the way of searches for that particular phrase. However there are a number of attractive alternatives like "home remedies for dogs" and "dog home remedies" that might be worth looking at.
Firefox's free SEO tool will give you some great information on your competition and allow you to decide if you should pursue a particular keyword. Once you have that program installed you can search Google and get some great competitive information on every return like the number of links on Yahoo, the Alexa rating, the Page Rank and a pot full of other data.
Another incredible free tool is Wordtracker.com which tends to deliver longer-tailed keyword phrases than Google AdWords. “Long tail” simply means the phrase has more words in it and usually demonstrates that a searcher has already made a few queries and is refining the search to a specific interest. This is often times a great indicator of “buying intent” and that’s a keyword phrase you want to rank for.
The one thing you want to keep in mind when viewing the results on Wordtracker is the number of searches are expressed as “in a day” rather than “in a month” like Google’s report.
Keyword research requires a little time and effort. When you want to make a website that will get noticed by the right people, it’s a worthy investment.
