The simple technique of carefully choosing your TOP TEN TARGET KEYPHRASES is probably one of the most important things you can do as a website owner.
It often seems to me that when I say “Please give me your ‘Top Ten Target Key Phrases’ to website owners, they either glaze over, or nod and agree without really engaging with what we’re asking for, and often have a vague stab at sending me a list of words. So this is a post to try and clarify what we’re talking about, and why this is so important, as well as giving some simple tips to make it as easy as possible.
So, first let’s break the subject down into bite sized chunks (a favourite technique of mine) starting with the phrase “Top Ten Target Key Phrases“.
Top Ten is a pretty simple concept, I’m sure you’ll all agree. We’ve all been listening to the Top Forty tracks on the radio for years, and the  Top Ten/Twenty/hundred of anything you like is a concept banded around over and over again. So, ten of, the most important, top of the pile, crucial and favourite….got it…? Thought you would. Next.
Target. Simple enough. What we’re aiming for; the place we want to be.
Key Phrases. You’ve all heard of Key Words. The “key” (aka the most important) space, breathe “phrase” Â no, not key word, but a PHRASE – meaning more than two words which appear in order. Nothing tricky here, just had to spell it out! Most key phrases are now more than three words long.
Right, putting it all together, you’ve got an understanding of what Target Key Phrases are, and if you put pen to paper and create your top ten….that’s your starting point!
There are a few considerations to remember; you might not search in the same way as your customers.
Why is it so important to get it right? Well, in the ever changing world of Search Engine Optimisation, longer search strings are more popular, and therefore more likely to get you a result.
For example lets say you sell Cheese (another favourite topic of mine). If you were hoping to sell Cheese online, you might think “Cheese” would be your number one keyword, and you’d probably be right. But… (pause for effect) do you want to be No.1 in Google for Cheese?! I doubt it. People searching Google for ‘cheese’ might not be looking to buy Cheese, they probably need the wikipedia page (which is undoubtedly top of the pile) or any one of the 211,000,000 other pages already indexed for ‘cheese’ and therefore may not be looking (specifically) for you. Sure, if you have a website selling Cheese, chances are, you’ll come somewhere in that list anyway, and cheeses would need to be in your keywords…. buuuuut…. you might prefer to be number 1 for the search phrase “buy cheese online” in which case – “buy cheese online” would more likely be your number 1 target key phrase, and therefore in optimising your site, would need to appear higher in your site.
So, you’ve got the idea. Now go! Write down 10 phrases that you think you want to target. Voila! Good luck, and let me know how you get on! twitter.com/lingoliz
