Keyword Research and Developement

Keyword research is the cornerstone of SEO, without good keyword research, your chances of a well optimized website are pretty slim. Keyword research is no longer just for a long list of terms in your keyword tag, but from an optimization standpoint, it will dictate the wording of most of your websites content.

Understanding keyword research and development begins with understanding how your clientele use the search engines. First of all you should brainstorm with a pencil and paper and come up with 5-10 "major" keywords that best describe your website, these should be one or two word phrases, like "web design" or "SEO". These 5-10 keywords will be the backbone of your keyword development strategy.

Core Terms

Now, using the 5-10 "major" keywords you should expand them to 2-4 word phrases, try to get about 10-20 of these. These "core terms" will not cover all of the searches people use to get to your sit, but they will cover about 60% of them. Try to keep some sort of organization with the core terms under the major keywords, when doing keyword research organization is very important. I use diagrams to show the relationship between keywords to make sure they overlap and cover every topic on the site I am optimizing.

Singulars and Plurals

Search engines can't discern between singular and plural versions of a word (yet?), so you need to account for all the people who search for "concert ticket" and those who search for "concert tickets". Keep in mind some singulars and plurals are not as important as others, like "shoe" and "shoes".

Stemming and Misspellings

Stemming and misspellings are a major pain, but let's face it, most of us either don't look when we type, or are bad spellers. I put these two into the same category because they are the "real world" problems you will encounter when optimizing your keyword selection and usage.

Stemming involves words with a suffix, like "web design" and "web designer". Stemming can include all the "-ing, -ed, -er" versions of your keywords. When you write your optimized content for your web site, try to use as many versions of your keywords as possible to cover all the potential searches.

A couple of tips to discovering misspellings are to type the word phonetically, leave out letters, or use letters next to it on the keyboard.

Stop Words

Stop words are common usage words like "a, and, the", there are hundreds of stop words, so just use your head when you look for them. Try not to use stop words in places like title tags and heading tags.

Related Terms

The last step in brainstorming is finding related terms. Related terms are keyword phrases that are closely related to your website, but not exactly what your site is about. Optimizing your related terms will help with your offsite optimization efforts like link popularity and link relevance.

The next phase will deal with finding important keywords you didn't find in the brainstorming process, and refining your list of keywords.

Search Engine Optimization Specialist

Getting a Search Engine Optimization Specialist depends on what stage of development your website already is in. Many website owners err by creating the website first then hiring a Search Engine Optimization Specialist to implements his expertise so that the website ranked higher in search engines like Google and Yahoo! A much better way of using the services of a Search Engine Optimization Specialist is to hire him even as far back as the website design planning stage to get much better results.

How do you know if the Search Engine Optimization Specialist you hired is competent in this field? Your Search Engine Optimization Specialist might simply do the usual integration of multiple keywords and phrases with those keywords into the content of the website (and into the HTML coding as well). Since this Search Engine Optimization Specialist practice is already being done by many, the effectiveness of this tactic is watered down significantly.

Choose a Search Engine Optimization Specialist team that can write content for you, assess the statistics of the website, are well-versed in HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), know how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be applied to websites for different industries and occupations, and can monitor the latest on search engine developments for you. This may entail several skills so you know you're getting more bang for your buck when you hire a Search Engine Optimization Specialist team.

It is important that your Search Engine Optimization Specialist team be aware of the difference between directory enhancement and a search engine optimization effort. Directory enhancement means your Search Engine Optimization Specialist team will select the categories under which your website seems to be most related to. The Search Engine Optimization Specialist team will then create concise descriptions about the content of your website (excluding the keyword stacking tactic which we mentioned earlier.) Search Engine Optimization, on the other hand, requires skills in the design, writing and then encoding into HTML of pages from your website so that your preferred search engines will rank your website highly enough so when Internet users search for certain keywords, your website will appear in the top search results.

The Search Engine Optimization Specialist should be able to tag for you the specific keywords and phrases which seem to be used most commonly in most Internet searches. A little known fact is that search engines do not use the same algorithms for very long – these search engines actually switch to new algorithms frequently. This practice helps keep spamming Search Engine Optimization Specialist from mastering the search engines and allows them to produce better search results for Internet users over time. So, apparently your search engine ranking is not cast in stone and may need to be pursued constantly by your Search Engine Optimization Specialist to insure that people will find your website among the millions out there on the Net.

If the web page uncovered by the search engine spider seems to differ from the web page viewed by the end user, that web page will be deemed spam and your website will be eliminated from the search engine database. This is tantamount, actually, to copyright infringement whose Search Engine Optimization Specialist rely on the cloaking practice to get away with their stratagem. Unfortunately for these people, search engines are trying to get the practice of cloaking by any Search Engine Optimization Specialist to be banned altogether because cloaking does not benefit the search engine and may even have detrimental side effects on search engines.

Some software programmers will even resort to taking content owned by another site and putting it on their client's website so that the Search Engine Optimization Specialist team can create "gateway pages". Never resort to this because it does not produce the optimal long-term results you are looking for. Rather, your website should be dependent on original and excellent content produced specifically for it, as well as a spider-friendly navigation system applicable for search engine usage.

The best way for your Search Engine Optimization Specialist to work for you is still dependent on the basics:

1) Create a well-planned and well-designed website
2) Create web pages that your audience can follow, and
3) Rely on a navigation system that both end users and search engines can follow and use.
4) Have a good strategy increase you link popularity.

If you follow these basics, you not only assist in your users' search activities but you also make life easier for the search engines themselves. In short, choose a Search Engine Optimization Specialist that really knows how to optimize search results for you the right way, rather than resorting to illicit tactics. Illicit tactics may work for a short time, but in the long term will only give you a bad rep among search engines and the wide, wide world of website owners.