Obtaining and maintaining rankings in the search engines starts with writing people friendly and therefore search engine friendly content – and writing your content should always start with keyword research.

Keyword research itself isn’t technically a difficult thing to do, but it does take some practice to earn your chops. When starting, you’re basically looking for 3 general criteria:

1. What keywords are most relevant to your offering, without being too specific? (don’t overlook too much at this point)
2. What keywords have the most search demand in your industry? (usually displayed in projected daily, monthly or yearly volumes)
3. What is the level of competition likely to be for these keywords? In other words, how easy is it going to be to rank (organically) for these keywords?

There are certainly other things to consider like, what keywords are currently driving traffic to your site, if you have an existing site with access to such analytical data. But for this article, we’ll assume you’re just starting off.

Compile A Rough Keyword List

To get started I always recommend using a keyword research tool. Today there are many free high-quality keyword research tools to use. Just a couple years ago, it was better to subscribe to a keyword program such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. And while these two programs are still well worth the subscription prices today, the free web tools of today are considerably more detailed and a good place to start. This is because many of them are coming from the major search engines themselves. My personal favorites include:

After using some of the above tools to compile your list, you may notice you don’t really have a clear picture of the competitive landscape for your keywords. Who is the competition? Even if you’re using a paid tool such as Keyword Discovery, or the SEO toolbar, you may feel confused about how to interpret the data. Try asking yourself one question: What are the top ten websites in my industry that rank well?

To help you answer this question, start typing into the search engines the following search parameters. (Replace “keyword” with what you have determined to be your top keywords according to search demand):

• allintitle:keyword (keyword occurrence in the title of the search result)
• allinanchor:keyword (keyword occurrence in the links to the search result)
• allinurl:keyword (keyword occurrence in the URL of the search result)
• allintext:keyword (keyword occurrence in the text of the search result)

Doing the above should help you get a clear idea of the competition that is applying particular SEO tactics to achieve rankings. Try matching the keywords on your list to specific competitors who rank well for them. Doing this should also give you a better idea of what keywords the competition may not be targeting.

You might realize the competition is scarce and/or sporadic. This doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t strong competition for your industry, it may just mean the competition isn’t applying certain SEO tactics very efficiently and this will be something you can take advantage of. On the other hand, if you find a website or two that is clearly in control of the search engine result pages (SERPs), then you should note this on your list as well. Then you’ll want to analyze their website further to see what additional keywords they may be targeting which aren’t on your list.

Organize Your Keyword List

After identifying your keywords using the criteria and tools above, my advice is to then create separate buckets targeting both the keywords you wish to achieve rankings for in the short term (defined by search volume and competition), and the keywords you wish to achieve rankings for in the long term.

In general, there are two “types” of keywords to take note of:

1. short-tail keywords – keyphrases that are single to three words long. Depending on your market, these will typically go into the long-term bucket.
2. long-tail keywords – keyphrases that are four or more words long. Go ahead and place these into your short-term bucket.

Why should you separate these?

There are a couple reasons why. First of all, it’s important to understand what you realistically will and will not rank for immediately. Again, depending on the competition in the SERPs and depending on the content you write, your goal is to get the most traffic you can from the search engines as quickly as possible. Therefore you always want to try to identify the less competitive keywords to target immediately. Secondly, your list of long-tail keywords is likely to deliver topic ideas when it comes time to write content.

One of the best representations I’ve seen that describes the relationship of short-tail and long-tail keywords as they relate to obtaining targeted organic search engine traffic is the following :

As you can see, the best opportunity to maximize potential ROI is to focus on key-phrases 3-4 words long. However, if you are not relying on ROI as one of your key performance indicators (most people are), then you’ll still want to analyze your targeted traffic potential based on the length of the key phrases and how much time it’s potentially going to take to rank well for all of your keywords.

Once you’ve determined all of the above, you should have a pretty good idea of what keywords you should start targeting in your content. look for common themes as you go through your keyword list(s). Chances are, people are looking for the same thing, but saying it in different ways. Semantics can sometimes play a key role in determining what keywords to target. For example, differentiating between using the term lawyer vs attorney – even though they have the same meaning, they may show different results in the SERPs. Also, be careful with accidentally assuming intent. If someone is searching online for “tax help”, this may mean they need tax preparation help, or it could mean they need tax debt help – two completely different services and therefore the traffic would not be as targeted.

Like I said, keyword research is not technically difficult, but it does take a little time to develop a system. Without doing keyword research, you may start targeting keywords with little or no demand. And even though you may obtain good rankings for these keywords, these rankings may not be driving nearly as much targeted traffic as they could. But if you use the tools above and start analyzing your keywords systematically, you should start to see your content begin to form that is both people and search engine friendly.

Happy Rankings. Joynt

MIT Campus, Cambridge Mass. The time is 2:00pm and the delay of hardware issues is hindering our presenter, Ben , @i3iviivi, on Resource Description Framework(s) or RDFa.

So far the highlight of our Design for Drupal event for me is this very topic. The idea categories and mark up can be just as importnat as the information inside of it. This is not Micro-Format. This information mapping system that will define for computers and search engines what data is being read.

Definitively creating definitions for intelligent search, that creates relationships between data and the people that publish it. Having this sort of definition set will make information (webpages) act more like mini databases and make the people who publish information more responsible for what they do. Or at least, that is the intent. Some might look at this as a way to pry open the door to ambiguity or user privacy.

EVOC a module, for Drupal, that was developed to create the relationship of data on your website to standards in RDF that are already defined on the web. openspring.org Originally, Drupal had been designed output both RSS and RDFa content.

FUZZ is a Firefox plug in that will display the available RFDa info from a page that has RDF meta information embedded.

Here is a link to Ben’s Session at D4D.

http://agaric.com/rdfa

the Wiki for RDFa

interesting thoughts about the future of data. Zach