Search Engine Optimisation Tips (Back to Introduction)

Tip 4. Know what terms people type into search engines to find you

If you run a hire car company and you had the choice of being number one on any of these terms in Yahoo! which would you go for?

A. Car Rental
B. Rental Cars

One of these terms (or "keywords" in search engine speak) is searched over 4 times more often than the other. In other words, if you accidentally choose the wrong one, you would only get 25% of the business that you could have had. If for some reason you didn't like either word and thought "Hire Car" would be a better bet, then you would miss out on over 95% of the business you could have had. Which one should you have gone for? Car Rental

It is also important to know how practical it is to achieve a good rank. The best measure for this is how many other sites appear in the search results when you do a search on a term. The fewer there are, the easier it is to achieve a good ranking.

We spend at least 2 days researching keywords for even the smallest project. Some of the bigger projects will take weeks. We believe that this is the most critical step in achieving good results from search engines.

As part of our research we use a tool called Wordtracker. This is an excellent starting point and even a couple of hours spent using the free trial will be better than doing no research at all.