Selecting Best Keywords to Target

Keyword research is most important part of any SEO campaign. Select wrong keywords to target and your entire SEO campaign will result in nothing but loss of time and efforts. Choosing the wrong keywords will force you to re-work your pages for new keywords and wait for the search engines to re-crawl your site. For this reason, a few hours trying to pick the right keywords is time well spent? 

To start, take a look at your pages. Look at them carefully and write down the words and phrases that best define your site. Try to build a list of two or three word phrases using free keyword research tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Once you have developed this list of potential keyphrases you are ready for the next step: to analyze the demand and supply for those keyphrases, and choose the best ones (those with good demand and not enough supply). 

Here are some steps which can guide you through selection of best keywords to target. 

Steps to select best keywords to target: 

1. Select the right keywords for each of your individual pages. 
2. The best keywords will be those that are popular search terms (terms that people actually search for), and that clearly describe the purpose and the content of your pages. They will also have to be keywords for which there is relatively low competition. 
3. The more specific your keyphrase, the easier it will be for your site to rank well. You should therefore target keyphrases with three or more words to significantly improve your chances. 
4. There is no sense in trying to optimize your pages for super-competitive keywords where you don't stand a chance of ranking well (most one-word keyphrases fall into this category: for example, it would be impossible to rank well for the keyword 'phone'). It would be better to target phrases like: 
1. 'mobile phone' - easier but still competitive 
2. 'smart mobile phones' - easier and less competitive 
3. 'business purpose phones' - easier and not as competitive.

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Strategy to follow while targeting broad keywords

Keyword research is an important part of your SEO campaign, its very important to select right keywords to target, because selecting wrong keywords will lead to nothing but your efforts and money will go in vain. I have seen that people often select too broad keywords, having too much competition. In my opinion you should select such keywords only when you are a big corporation and you have a great  fan following who love to talk about you, because it will lead to automatic link building which is very essential while doing SEO.

Recently I came across one question which was like this:

I want to get the SERP of the keyword “iPhone application development”. Back links for this page is 27.

when I searched "iPhone application development" I saw that websites which were coming on top were having very good backlinks. So my opinion on this was:

In this competition should also be taken into consideration. If you search for “iPhone application development” on google.co.in (considering that you are targeting Indian market) then the first website which we are getting has the targeted keyword in the url itself and they have enormous backlinks too. So, if you are a start up its very difficult for you to rank for such a broad keyword in a short span of time because your competitors might also be doing SEO on a continuous basis and more over they might be having a good and satisfied clientele who might be active on social networks giving backlinks to your competitor.
So my recommendation for you is to make a good back linking strategy, start building links on a continuous basis and target other keywords too along with your broad search term "iphone application development". You can also use social media to your advantage as you are iphone apps developer.

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