In order to better organize your search engine optimization campaign, its a good idea to develop an extensive keyword phrase list that will serve as a foundation for the SEO process.
I prefer using Microsoft Excel.
Create Columns for the following information:
Keyword Phrase : Popularity : Competition : Priority : Optimized
Next, conduct your SEO keyword phrase research using Wordtracker or Trellian, and Google Adwords keyword phrase research. List any keyword phrases that are relevant for your website and fill in the subsequent columns.
Popularity: Searches that receive 50+ hits a day should be considered Highly popular, searches that receive between 10 and 50 hits a day should be considered Medium, and searches that receive 10 or less searches should be considered Low. For Google Adwords, develop an estimation based on the information provided.
Competition: Keyword phrases with 10,000 or more competing sites should be considered High, 100-10,000 should be considered Medium, 100 or less should be considered low.
Priority: Each keyword phrase should be assigned a rank from 1-4. Phrases with a rank of 1 should be bolded, these will be your main keyword phrases, for which you’ll want to optimize for throughout your campaign. These can be both universal terms (ie: used cars) and local, less competitive terms (such as: used cars maryland). You’ll have to use your intuition to determine which popular, highly competitive phrases you want to optimize for. In general, Phrases with High Popularity and Low competition, or Medium popularity and Low competition should be considered 1; however, you may want to develop your own system for ranking phrases. Remember, keyword phrases with a rank 1 are your most important, and will be optimized for during the first phase of your SEO development. Phrases with rank 2 will be optimized for during the second phase of your optimization, and so on and so forth.
Optimized: Save this spot for Y, meaning you have reached your search engine optimization for this particular keyword phrase. Also, you may want to include the date when you achieved your goal.
