Good, Smart Work Today pays out over the Long-Term: Guide to Keyword Research and SEO

In today’s society, the world’s information is at the tips of your fingers. Just type in what you are looking for into Google and you’ll find it. There is no debate that the majority of the world is using search engines to find information.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

So how does this relate to your business? This is a very simple question with a very complicated answer. The short answer; search engines can give you free, targeted traffic looking for information about your products or related products.

Because the traffic is free and targeted, competition is incredibly fierce. However, most website owners have no idea how to rank their pages and get them to show up high in the search results. This is a good thing, because if everyone knew how to do this, it would be close to impossible to rank for any competitive terms.

Taking a step back, let’s examine how people use search engines; this will give insight into why it’s important to reach into this market. Having years of keyword research experience, there are general trends that can be made about how people search for information.

If someone wants to find out general information about wine; they search for terms like “wine” or “wineries.” These are very untargeted people, because they are not looking for something specific. As searches become more specific, the people become more targeted, and thus more valuable.

Someone searching for “Napa Valley Wine” or “Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon” is looking for wine or Cabs from Napa Valley; and if you are a Napa Valley winery that produces Cabernet Sauvignon; wouldn’t you like these people on your site? However, competition is still very high for these terms, let’s keep digging deeper.

A search for “Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon” or “Oakville wine” is even more specific and targeted. And it can go all of the way down to winery names. So great; how does this relate to my site?

As a website owner, you can set up your pages to target certain keywords. For example; if you have a page on your site that is about your wine; you don’t want to target the keyword “wine” because you’ll never win for it. But if you target a very specific term; like “Rudd 2003 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon,” you might get very targeted traffic, but the trade off is numbers; very few people search for that term.

A good idea would be to target would be to target a term that has a good number of people searching for it, but is still specific enough to drive targeted traffic; like “Oakville wine” or “Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon.” The more you get into keyword targeting, the complicated it gets. If you do good keyword research, you can target keywords that are specific to what you are doing, but are not that competitive.

They key is finding a balance between competition (other sites targeting that term), specificity (how relevant that term is to your site) and the popularity of that term (how many people are searching for it).

If you get the right balance of those things, and you optimize your page for search, then you will get free, targeted traffic from the search engines. This is a great way to expand the reach of your brand. And because these people are already searching for these terms, they are interested in finding information about, or buying wine. Additionally, once you have your pages set up correctly, search engines will drive traffic to your site indefinitely. Search Engine Optimization is a good long term investment that can pay dividends for years and years after the work is done.

This entry was posted by Ryan Fujiu on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 6:49 pm and is filed under AdWords, Keywords, On-Site SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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