If you've followed the steps in the previous section, you should have a list of at least a dozen highly targeted keywords that are relevant
to your website's content.
In our example, all our keywords will be related to "loan consolidation". We may have variations such as "student
loan consolidation", "get out of debt" and even "bad credit debt consolidation loan". Note that it's optimal to have the main keywords appear
in each secondary keyword (ex: "student loan consolidation"), but not required. As you can see from our loan website, we've also included the
keyword phrase "get out of debt" which has absolutely no reference to our main keywords. The phrase "get out of debt" is what we would consider
a weak keyword phrase. Weak keyword phrases are still useful as even the weakest keyword phrase can gain your website some traffic, so it's
important to bend the rules a little bit. By including all keyword phrases that have potential to gain your website traffic, your ensuring that
you leave all bases covered and maximize each traffic outlet.
The importance of this keyword list cannot be stressed enough! This list will serve as the foundation of all that is to follow, so if you did
not at least open up a WordTracker trial account please
DO SO NOW!
We suggest opening an account and unlocking the full potential and maximize
your efforts, but the trial account will still help you discover some essential keywords.
Now that we have our keyword list, take a moment to analyze them. For our example site we have the following sampling (kept short for illustration purposes only):
-
loan consolidation (our primary keyword phrase)
-
student loan consolidation
-
get out of debt
-
bad credit debt consolidation loan
Our next goal is to build pages around these keywords, so it's important to
focus our efforts on the keywords that will most likely gain us the most traffic and place us higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
If you used WordTracker, the keyword phrase to use will be the one that had the highest
KEYWORD EFFECTIVENESS INDEX (KEI) score. KEI is a measure
of how effective any given keyword phrase is. The higher the KEI value, the higher the likelihood of placing well in the SERPs with it. If you
did not use
Wordtracker, you'll have to take a guess on which keyword phrase will be the most effective. For illustration purposes, we'll assume
the highest KEI value placed for our fictional loan site was for the keyword phrase "student loan consolidation".