As part of launching our new website: http://www.foodweek.com.au/, I started to do some keyword research. One of the methods to do keyword research is to look at your competitors websites and websites which comes up under a search term for your proposed keywords and see which keywords they are using.

I was surprised, not to say shocked, to find out that many reputable websites with good content and good page rank do not have keywords nor description set up on their pages. I mean, you don’t have to hire a search engine specialist to set up a few keywords on your website. All you need to do is send an email to your webmaster asking him to load your keywords and page description to the relevant pages. If you have a content management system which supports uploading the keywords yourself, it’s even better as it won’t cost you a thing.

So, before or after you read the rest of this post, go to your home page and other pages and check whether your keywords are set or not.

Anyway, I started at the end just to express my feelings. I won’t write a long post about choosing keywords but I will tell you that it is one of the most, if not the most important aspect of your website optimisation. Website optimisation, among other things, is designed to get traffic to your website through search engines.

When a person uses a search engine and enters the words “retail recruitment company”, the search engine will go to all the pages it has in its index and among other things, will look for those specific keywords. If you page has those keywords, most chances are that your website will come up on the results page. Whether it comes up on page 1 or page 500 depends on many other criteria but it will most likely come up. If you don’t have those keywords set up on your page, it will most certainly not come up.

So how do you choose your keywords? I will make it short. If you want more information you can find it out there on the web.

1. Think about all the words and phrases that people may use to search for your services. Anything you can think of.
   • Don’t just go for the most generic ones like “retail recruitment”. Go for the distinct searches because they are the ones most likely to get traffic for your website. It is called the theory of “The long tail” which basically means that those distinct search queries all together will generate more traffic than the generic keywords.
   • So think about phrases such as: “retail recruitment company in Sydney”
   • “retail recruitment for hardware retailer”
   • “working in retail in Australia”
   • And many other search queries.
2. Look at your competitor’s websites. It may be that some of them already hired a search engine optimiser who researched many possible words. To see which keywords they have chosen you can go to their page and then clicking on your browser’s menu: View->source. A notepad will open with a lot of code. At the top of the page somewhere you should be able to find the following words: <META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”retail, retail recruitment,…..”>. The bold words are the keywords which the search engine sees.
3. Use the ~ search query - A useful way to find those websites which has a specific keyword (which is helpful to see what other keywords they use) is to enter the following search query in Google for example: ~recruitment company. Using the ~ sign will generate all of those websites which are indexed for that specific keyword. You can then take it from there to explore who is using which keywords.
4. Use Google external AdWords tool – this tool allows you to enter a keyword or a phrase and Google will generate more keywords and even give you information about the search volume and bidding price for pay per click advertisement. This is the link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
5. Another tool similar to the Google tool is overture: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
6. Use dictionaries and other tools to help you find nouns and related verbs to your keywords. The Princeton Wordnet tool is very useful: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

There are more ways but I think what you have here should be enough to get you started. Start with setting your keywords then look at other ways to promote your website.

Now with all those keywords, you should choose the ones that better fit your website and your content.

If you want this done but don’t want to do it yourself, just get in touch with me and we will find a way to get it done for you.

Good luck,

Nati.