Most Common SEO mistakes – Keyword Selection

I am not going into the details – rather just giving you an overview of the keyword selection process.

Why should I mention keyword selection as the most common SEO mistakes? Anyone who has been blogging around for some time and knows a little bit about search engine optimization is aware of the importance of keywords in deciding the rankings.

Most Common SEO mistakes – Keyword SelectionThe different aspects of keywords research – choosing the right keyword phrase, where to put keywords in your blog, and keyword density have high influence in deciding whether you will land on the first page of Google or the last one.

Keyword selection – I will illustrate it through an example of my own blog. I write about blogging, making money and SEO tips.

Let’s say I decided to rank higher for “Search Engine Optimization”. Now, since this is a common term and chances are that thousands of high-quality blogs who have spend dollars and time on keyword planning and research have already been ranking on this phrase, it would be almost impossible for me to rank better than them.

More read: How to start a blog with WordPress.

So, what should I do now?

There comes the concept of long-tail keywords. I may choose “Search Engine optimization for beginners” as a keyword or “Search engine optimization tips for WordPress bloggers”. I can easily determine that these are comparatively less written keywords than “Search Engine Optimization” and chances of ranking higher is more. However, these long tail keywords have a low number of searches.

So you have two choices – ranking on the 10th page of Google for “Search Engine Optimization” for 1million searches OR ranking on the 1st-2nd page of Google for a long tail keyword with say 10,000 searches. Which will you prefer if I ask you how many times do you even go to the third page of Google search results while querying?

Another point regarding keyword selection.

The searchers these days are more specific towards search. If you want to know the price of a smartphone, you won’t simply type the model of that phone. Rather, you will end up querying something like “price and specification of XXXX 1234 Model”. This becomes the long tail keyword that may get you higher in search results.

What I have written here is just a summary of the complete story. I will try to write more about these points in the coming days.