Free Keyphrase Analysis Help

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By Jon | May 28, 2008

SEO Keyphrase Analysis

If you speak to any SEO professional they will tell you that keyphrase analysis is one of the key factors in Search Engine Optimisation. This is an obvious truth. If you optimise your website for the wrong phrases then you will attract the wrong customers. This sounds like common sense but you might be surprised by how often people get this wrong

Most people think that they know exactly what the keyphrases are for their company before performing keyphrase analysis. Most people are wrong.

An important aspect of keyphrase analysis is to be able to separate yourself from your business. This sounds easier than it is and this is why it is a good idea to perform a full keyphrase analysis.

Let’s break down the keyphrase analysis:

The Competitors

A good start is to see what phrases your competitors are using.

First I recommend looking at the competitors’ title tag, meta description and meta keywords. Although the meta keywords are not as significant as they used to be I recommend having a look at them.

To look at these, simply go to the website in question, go to View, then Source.

This will show you the code of the website.

The title is as follows:

<title>Title is here</title>

The meta description is as follows:

<meta name=”description” content=”Keyphrases are here“>

The meta keywords are as follows:

On a website these are normally the first blocks of information that the search engine will view.

The title tag is the most important part of the on-site optimisation.

If your competitor is optimising their website for search engines these are what they will change first.

Another important aspect to look at is how often these phrases are on the page. Have a look through the page to see how often they have repeated these phrases.

When you look through these I recommend making a note of all of the phrases that they use.

Make your own list

After looking through competitors websites you will have more of an idea of what to optimise your website for. I’m sure that you now have a better idea about phrases than you did before. This is the time to make your own list, use your competitors phrases along with your own knowledge of your company to make a large list of phrases that can be used throughout your website. We will call this list “freephrase list”.

What if your competitors have got it wrong?

The truth is that they might have… This is why we have created the freephrase list. It is basically a foundation. Now we need to find a system that works. For this there are 2 methods. Either can be used but for better results I recommend using both.

Use a search term suggestion tool

The first method is to use a search term suggestion tool. There are a lot of tools that you can buy or even get for free if you are willing to look for them. Here are two good ones http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ and http://www.wordtracker.com/. There are many others out there though.

Basically these tools will show you how many times a phrase is searched for per month (although sometimes the time periods differ). This is when you use your freephrase list. Type each of the phrases into the tool to see how many times each phrase is searched for per month. These tools will also show you alternative phrases that people search for. These phrases can be very useful and may (and most of the time do) replace your original phrases.

Now you have your phrases: the Suggest list

Use Google Adwords

This is a good way to find keyphrases and have them work for you at the same time. You can either use Google Adwords for your freephrase list (this can be expensive) or you can use Google Adwords for the suggest list which makes more sense.

I recommend using this for at least a month, then view the impressions and “click throughs” that you get.

Now you will have some true evidence to show you the better keyphrases: you will have your very own Keyphrase List.

Keyphrase Competition

Now that you have the Keyphrase List that you want you need to be realistic when using these phrases in your website. This is a simple task.

Type the phrases into Google, Yahoo and MSN (the top 3 search engines). Or because Google is the main search engine you might only want to use Google for this.

Log the number of competing pages for each phrase and store this in the Keyphrase List. So you will now have all of the standard data that you need. You will know that the phrase is relevant to your website, how often the phrase is searched for and the competing pages.

Now you can decide which phrases to optimise your website for. (The more a phrase is searched for and the less competition the better).

More advanced elements of keyphrase analysis will be explained in future posts.