The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, improve your conversion rate, and make yourself visible to search engines could easily give you a serious tension headache. Even using some of the techniques that have been discussed in this chapter to find the right keywords and perfect your methods of research take time. It’s not something that you can just jump into today and be successful at before the sun sets. It’s far more successful if you start slowly and build your way to greater success.

You already know that you must first create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorming and asking customers are two ways to build that list. You can also include all of the keywords that are suggested by keyword suggestion tools, and you might even consider pulling out a thesaurus to find additional words and phrases that you haven’t considered. Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers and avoid broad or generic terms that are so all-encompassing they apply to every site that’s even remotely related to yours. These words are incredibly difficult to rank high with and won’t drive quality traffic to your site. Instead, focus on words that are relevant but not overly used, and always keep your eyes open for those words that are very specific but highly targeted to your site or offerings.

When creating your first keyword list, include all of the words that you can come up with. This part of selecting your keywords and phrases is actually easy. You can include everything and don’t have to worry about the quality of what you’re including until later. Unfortunately, because it is so easy to create this first list, many people make the assumption that PPC marketing is easy. This first step may be, but it does get much harder as you research and qualify words and phrases and then work those words and phrases into PPC marketing programs.

Keywords and phrases will need constant revision, so you should always be creating that “first” keyword list. Keep a running list of words that will apply to your site. Each time something is changed on the site, or something changes in the field that you’re in, you’ll have to go through all of these steps again. If you are not constantly testing, analyzing, adding to, and removing nonperforming keywords and phrases as appropriate, you’ll find that PPC programs that worked really well in the beginning lose effectiveness over time.

You’d better believe that your competition will be constantly monitoring and revising their keyword and PPC strategies. And if you’re not regularly taking advantage of all your keyword resources, you might as well hand over your customer lists to your competition, because they’re going to end up with all of your customers anyway.

Keywords are what draw potential customers to your web site. These potential customers are either visitors who are ready to buy now or they’re browsers whom you can motivate into making a purchase or reaching a goal conversion that you’ve established. So remember that when you’re building your initial keyword list, you’re using a little educated guessing to get started in reaching highly qualified site visitors. Later, you can rely on specific keyword-related tools and analysis to replace your educated guesses with more concrete keywords and phrases that will help you reach your goals.

Forbidden Search Terms and Poison Words:

When you’re creating your keyword lists, it’s important to keep in mind that some search terms will result not in higher quality visitors, but instead in either a low ranking or even complete removal from search listings. These aren’t just ineffective keywords and phrases. These are what are called Forbidden Search Terms or Poison Words. These words are known to decrease your pages’ rankings if a search engine finds them in your site’s title, description, or even in the URL. These words can either kill or lower your pages in rankings.

Here’s the problem with the forbidden or poison terms: there’s really no consistent or standard list of terms to which you can turn for guidance on the words you should not use. For example, vulgar words are usually considered to be forbidden or poison; however, you can do a search for one of these words and you’ll return a fair number of results. However, using the words in your site tagging as a means to rank high in a search will result in your site being buried or even omitted from search results.

So although there are no official lists of words that search engines use for filtering inappropriate keywords, you can figure out some guidelines for yourself. Two types of words have the potential to create issues for your site if you use them as keywords within the site or for PPC marketing purposes:

• Vulgar words
• Politically incorrect words (these words are especially dangerous in countries like China and North Korea where censorship is prominent)

Despite what seems like a simple list for types of words to avoid, it’s really not that simple. Many words can be excluded or even flagged by a search engine because those words are associated with search engine spam. When it becomes apparent that a word or term seems to be used strictly to rank highly, even when included on a page full of unrelated content or links, search engines will flag that word or phrase and will consider closely the relationship to other words and links on a page before making a ranking determination. The problem with that, however, is that as soon as search engines crack down on a word or phrase, another one pops up to take over.

Now, don’t confuse poison words with keyword poison. Keyword poison is actually the use of keywords on your site far too many times. When you’re including keywords on your site, you should use them only as often as necessary and not one time more than that. If you throw your keywords into the site randomly, you’re poisoning the search term ranks and run the risk of having your site knocked farther down in the ranking or even having it delisted completely as spam.

Finally, forbidden search terms and poison words are different from Stop Words. Stop words are those words that are so common on the Web that they are usually ignored by search engines and are completely useless in your PPC programs and other keyword marketing efforts. Here’s a brief list of some of the most common stop words, though there are dozens more that might be included:

• A
• An
• The
• But
• E-mail
• When
• Where
• How
• Free
• If
• And
• While
• Or

Tags: Choosing Keywords, Forbidden Search Terms, Keyword Analysis, Keyword List, Poison Words, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Tips, Stop Words

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Daily SEO Tips, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.