Finalizing your keyword list
Put the final touches on your keyword list by checking the KEI of your new terms and looking to see who is currently ranking well for those terms.
You will want to put in a little bit of time on research so that you can be certain that your keywords are targeted. It won’t make any difference if you’re ranking well on terms that don’t bring in the type of visitors that you want - the kind that buy the products, services or other that the web site has to offer.
At this point, it’s a good idea to take this list to the client and make sure he/she fully understands and signs off on it. Many times I’ve moved forward with selected keywords only to have the client say - this isn’t an appropriate term, what are you doing! It’s best to always double check and get a final approval before moving forward.
What now?
Good question. If you have access to some kind of stats reporting, I would suggest taking a baseline report, just to get an idea of any kind of progress that is made with your SEO efforts. This is especially important if you’re being paid to do basic SEO - I’ve found that clients LOVE reports!
Some basic terms you’ll want to understand include:
unique visitors - just what it says, how many unique visitors came to the web site on a given time period.
hits - this is the number of server requests made during a given time period. A server request can be when a page and all the images on the page are viewed - each one is a separate hit. hits aren’t a very useful measure although some people will try to tell you otherwise.
spider visits - this is important just because you want to have the spiders (search engines) going through your site on a regular basis.
search engines - somewhere in the stats program should be as basic list of what search engines visited, using what keywords, and how many times. This is important.
Ok, enough of the basics of keywords.
Meta tags - what you really need to know