Yesterday, we defined a keyword which is essentially a word or phrase you enter into a search engine. Once people understand what a keyword is, it’s natural to want to start to use that knowledge across your website properties. This is commonly refereed to as keyword strategy.

The first stop to define your keywords is to look at your business and describe what you sell. This can be both general and very specific. But you should define the 4 keywords or phrases that describe you best. For example, let’s take our own site Digital Firefly Marketing. We offer search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay-per-click management and email marketing. These are our offerings. Once we are very clear on what we are selling we move onto tyring to understand how people search for those products so we can use those searches as a basis to develop our keyword strategy. The best tool for this is Google’s keyword tool.

Using Google’s keyword tool, we enter each offering and Google will report back on the number of searches and how competitive each keyword is. They will also supply a list of keywords that are similar to the search phrase you just entered. You will get a report that looks like this:

Once we have that information we need to look at the following:

• Take a look at how many searches and how competitive each word is. The more competitive a keyword the harder it will be to rank in Google for that keyword. Conversely the more searches there are, the more likely it will be that someone will find you by Googling you.
• Look at the keyword ideas. Sort by competitiveness. Those words that are not competitive should be used in your website first as individual pages or blog articles.
• Begin to incorporate those keywords into your websites.

Once you have your research and incorporation completed, you need to continually analyze how you rank on certain searches so you can see if you are improving. There are two free tools that make this easy.

• Google Webmaster will show you how you rank on a rolling 30 day basis and if you are going up or down. This is specific to Google only and is found under “your site on the web. Here is what it looks like:
• Google Analytics will show you which keywords resulted in people going to your website and is found under traffice sources .