With so many elements to focus on when building and maintaining a website – excellent design, even better content and plenty of forms of traffic, just to name a few – it can be easy to get lost in one or more areas. One area in which you cannot afford to lose influence is in the area of keywords, which help drive organic traffic to your site through Google and paid traffic through programs such as AdWords. While keywords are not the be-all, end-all like they once were, they still play an immense role in how search engines like Google perceive your site and subsequently rank it. In the following article, we’ll discuss ways in which you can be sure to find the best keyword choices to target for recognition by Google.

Abandon Short Keywords

In years past, targeting keywords that comprised one or two words was easy enough. You could simply include it a couple of times in an article or post and wait for your site to rank on the first page of Google. Nowadays, there is simply too much competition for that strategy to be a viable approach. Because of this, the best keywords that you can target will be those that are long-tail in nature. This means that you’ll want to target keyword phrases that contain anywhere from four to seven words in them. Because these are more precise, there will be less competition in them. As such, you’ll be able to spend the necessary time establishing yourself in these SERPs and enjoying more traffic through a smaller audience by not having to compete with an endless stream of competitors.

Be Precise

When pinging servers for prospective keywords, we have a tendency of wanting to get the most bang for our buck. Simply put, this means that we want to target keywords that will reach the maximum number of people possible. This strategy is not a good idea when solely evaluated based on the number of people that potentially could be reached, because ranking well for these keywords will prove to be more difficult. Instead of targeting broader phrases and keywords, try to be more precise in who and what you target. Yes, this will result in fewer people as a whole searching for those terms, but you’ll be able to rank better and quicker than you would in those other niches. In short, you’ll very likely get the same amount – if not more – traffic for these efforts than you would targeting broader keywords.

Use a Keyword Planner

Once you have pinpointed a few dozen variations of keywords and phrases that you wish to consider, it is then time to refine them for use! By using a keyword planner such as Google’s Keyword Planner, you’ll be able to gain valuable insight into each one of the potential phrases and words you had planned to use by pinging servers for more information. You can also use features such as the “Keyword Ideas” function to help extrapolate a common theme for more ideas. As you work your way through the proposed keywords, you’ll find that some are not all that they are cracked up to be, while other new ones that you had not considered will get added to the list. At the end of the process, you should possess a more refined keyword list that will help you get better results and more traffic for your website.