The key to this is thorough research, coupled with good old fashioned trial and error.
Target one or two keywords per page. Potential customers will be searching a range of different keywords, and no site targets only one throughout, unless its product or service is extremely limited. So, you need to gage what are the most precedent keywords on each page of your site, and then rewrite the copy and start to optimise the meta data around those specific targets.
There are many keyword research tools available online, I prefer to stick to the trusted main players – Google’s AdWords, Wordtracker and the fairly new Google Search Based Keyword Tool, beta version. Although it’s primarily for pay per click campaigns, AdWords is awesome because it provides you with a range of metrics that tell you the average search volume of the keywords, their competitiveness and their cost (were you bidding on them for PPC). With this data you can judge if it’s worth targeting certain keywords for organic search, or going for the long tail and spying a gap in the search market.
Competitor analysis is vital. Search rankings are highly competitive, and even more so as the value of SEO becomes increasingly realised by mainstream companies struggling out of a recession. Have a look at what keywords your client’s competitors are targeting and see if you can’t give them a run for their money or if they’ve missed some long tail keywords that you could easily rank for. Also get in the mind of the customer, think - what would they search?
Local search terms. Think about dialect and region as these can have a large impact on search terms, for example in the UK we would search for ‘Nike trainers’, whereas in the US they’re more likely to search for ‘Nike sneakers’. Subtleties such as this can make all the difference in your ranking for certain keywords. In addition Google’s AdWords tool has also added this metric recently so you can now get data for the global search volume as well as the local search volume of your keyword.
To achieve the maximum return on investment, experimenting is essential. If something isn’t quite working and your visitors are simply browsing rather than acting on conversions then it’s time to mix it up and try some different keywords. If your bounce rate is through the roof then the page content isn’t right for the keyword it’s optimised for, so again, experiment with alternatives until you find a winner.
As a final thought why not try some old school analogue techniques, whip out that thesaurus and experiment with some synonyms.
