A starter’s guide to SEO – STEP 1

In yesterday’s entry we went through a quick basics on SEO . Today we will implement the first step i.e. finding the right keyword. The website I am using for our case study is ghuj.com which I recently re launched after a major updates including the software and the design. My website ghuj.com is related to GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), it is an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.
Now it is time to find the right keyword, since my niche is tutorials so mostly I will be concentrating on keywords related to GIMP tutorials. I will try to choose 5 top keywords in terms of search volume and start optimizing our site. To choose the right keyword first I will check Overture score (ovtd.com ). Here I give Gimp Tutorials as search and found out the keyword “gimp tutorial” is more popular than “gimp tutorials” all these days I was promoting via the wrong keyword. It is better to be late than never. So my first keyword is “gimp tutorial”. The other keywords are not worth to be considered as the search count is too low.

Next I went to Google Adword Keyword Suggestion Tool and gave GIMP as the keyword, I sorted the keywords on the basis of search volume. Depending upon the result chose these remaining keywords. I wanted to choose a total of 5 Keywords but ended up choosing 6.
Here is the final list of keywords for which I will be optimizing my site.

1. gimp tutorial
2. gimp download
3. the gimp
4. gimp windows
5. gimp brushes
6. gimp mac

Now I compared these top 5 keywords to choose one main keyword. Rest of the keyword will be supporting keywords. To compare these keywords I used Google Trends. It gives you the comparisons depending upon search volumes across various countries and sorted by month, year. I chose the region to be across the word and year to be 2007. You see the live comparisons here.
Here is the screenshot.

After observing the trend I found out “gimp download” is the most popular keyword among the keywords we selected. We will try to concentrate on all the keywords but will try to give more importance to this keyword. I didn’t choose the keyword “the gimp” because it is too competitive but we will use this keyword.
Let us now see how we are currently performing for these keywords.

• Gimp Tutorials – 17th Rank
• Gimp Download – Not in top 50
• The Gimp – Not in top 50
• Gimp Windows – Not in top 50
• Gimp Brushes – Not in top 50
• Gimp Mac – Not in top 50

We can now see we are not performing well in the search engine for our niche. Tomorrow I will do onsite optimization to include these keywords and concentrate to make our page more Search Engine friendly.