SEO Blog

Your keywords play a pivotal role in the successes and failures of any website. If you choose the wrong terms, you could find yourself hopelessly off the radar in terms of search engine rankings, whilst the right ones could be delivering a steady stream of targeted traffic right throughout your site.

The earlier you are able to define your core keywords, the sooner you will be able to begin your optimisation process. Nothing is more frustrating than writing a whole page of copy, plus Meta targeting one set of keywords and then having to rewrite the lot with another. Over time, changes may occur as your SEO campaign develops, but you don’t want to have to change this too early in the game.

As Search Engine Optimisation takes time to develop, you have to give your keywords time to establish themselves on your site and allow the search engines to understand what terms your pages are relevant for. If you keep chopping and changing you keywords, you could end up undermining the whole process and will fail to gain any meaningful rankings – certainly not for any length of time.

When it comes to choosing you keywords, it is important to remember that it isn’t just what terms you think best sum up your page, but also what visitors will be searching for. Short tail phrases tend to simply provide the name of a product, the area of business you are in or other fundamental details. However, if you expand these a little further you can start moving into the realms of long tail keywords.

These more elaborate terms and phrases will help you to gain rankings quicker and higher up – albeit with slightly fewer searchers. But these can be combined, or at least amalgamate your short term phrases, helping you to effectively optimise both concurrently. This is a particularly good technique for anybody beginning their SEO work in an extremely competitive market, as it will help to temporarily bypass keywords that could take months to gain a ranking for.

Whether you decide to target just long or short tail keywords, it is essential that you do effective research to determine what levels of competition you are up against and how many people are searching for those phrases. If you find that you are up against thousands of sites for a phrase that only attracts a few hundred visitors a month, it probably isn’t worth the hassle. It pretty much goes without saying, but the perfect balance is to have a term that is popular amongst searchers but doesn’t have a prohibitive competition rate – the lower the better in fact.

By doing all of this work at the outset, you can save yourself a lot of time and aggravation further down the line. Give your site and its SEO the best possible chance of succeeding by taking the time to define your keywords and then implement them accordingly. If you do need to change them further on down the line when you’ve had the chance to analyse their effectiveness, then feel free to do so, that’s all part of SEO. Just don’t cut your keywords down before they’ve had the chance to fully develop, you could end up worse off for it.