Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of those hot-button topics that can get some people pretty riled up. Yet once you’ve gotten your feet a bit wet and gain a decent grasp of what it’s all about (and trust me, this takes time), it’s really not so complicated. Regardless, SEO has been given a bad name by plenty of mainstream outlets who are often quick to disregard SEO practices as “spam” and nothing more.
Does SEO matter to you? It may very well not, or perhaps it does and you don’t realize it. Are you trying to drive organic traffic to your site? Do you want to appear on the first (or first few) pages of Google for a particular keyword? Do you want your site to eventually make some money, either through affiliate revenue or selling the domain itself? Okay, then. SEO matters.
My recent post about the importance of Google Analytics is a decent starting point as to why you probably want to be aware of your site’s search engine presence. Google Analytics is really at the heart of tracking your SEO efforts and traffic sources, with search engine traffic being the most intriguing to me, personally. Most people would probably agree. What are people searching to find me? User behavior when it comes to searching and keywords is rather fascinating, and I’m always amused when someone stumbles on one of my sites through a seemingly random keyword.
Getting traffic through keywords isn’t inherently easy, although it all depends on what you’re going for. Long-tail (three words or more) phrases are obviously easier to rank for than single terms. Sometimes you may rank for keywords unintentionally, such as if you’re running a personal blog and you happen to have a unique last name. It’s ranking for the keywords that people are paying for via AdWords that’s truly tricky.
If you’ve never tackled keyword research before, I suggest you spend some time playing with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This can help you better understand how people are searching for terms related to your site, how fierce the competition is, long-tail vs. single term, etc. If nothing else, it’s a good bit of fun (in my opinion).
To delve a bit deeper, I recently wrote an article concerning common keyword research mistakes which may be of interest.
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