Defining your Niche and Audience

To start with our keyword research, we will first figure out which segment of Web surfers we want to find our site, and subsequently, which terms will most likely bring these visitors to us.

Unfortunately, today it's not enough to figure out the keywords that make up the essence of your business. If the industry is competitive (such as, for instance, Web hosting and Web design), there are lots of sites competing to be on the top for these terms. Luckily, Web surfers have become more and more conscious of the need to make their search specific – people who are serious about their search look for "Los-Angeles Web hosting" or "Linux Web hosting" instead of just "Web hosting". Therefore, it gives a bit more variety to optimizers.

Therefore, generic keywords are usually not the best approach. As a rule, it's better to focus on niche keywords related to your product or service.

There are highly specific keywords that people don't search for often but when they do, getting that traffic is very important since these visitors are targeted and will most probably convert into customers. On a regular basis, these are things like actual product names (e.g. Samsung SyncMaster 757 monitor). If someone searches for the specific name of a product, there is a high possibility they are looking to make a purchase. So, those keywords can bring serious profit. If you are running an affiliate site or an online store then this can be very important.

For instance, your site deals with selling office and computer desks. You want it to be on the top when people enter into search boxes "office desks" and "computer desks". These are your strategic keywords for the whole site. Each page of your site can have (and should have) its own strategic keywords, depending on the content. For instance, one page deals with "high-end office desks", the second one with "glass computer desks", etc. It makes a lot of sense to optimize each page separately for different strategic terms. This means targeting each page to a specific search term that relates to the overall theme of your site. In our example of computer desks, we'll target each page to a suitable market that is looking for a certain kind of computer desk. Thus, we'll be competing with fewer websites on the same keywords, and our pages will be optimized for terms people actually use when searching. This will also bring much better results than optimizing your whole site for "computer desks".

The next thing to point out is local targeting. For example, if you're optimizing a Web development site whose owner is located in Sydney, Australia, using keywords such as "Web development Sydney" or "Web development services Australia" will make search engines refer most people from this location to your site because lots of people tend to search services or products locally.
So here are main points you should remember from this lesson:

1. Strategic key phrases should always consist of at least two words (but it's even better to have 3-5 words, as that's the average length of a search phrase).
2. Start with finding the most general terms characterizing your business, then break into more specific ones and optimize each page for the most specific term characterizing this page.
3. Where possible, make your decision in favor of a product name.
4. If possible/applicable, optimize one or several pages for localized terms.

At this step, you can step away from this course for a moment and try to figure out one strategic keyword or key phrase for your own home page and several other pages of your site.