The University has taken a two pronged approach to keyphrase planning and research. The central e-Marketing team has identified a list of keywords and phrases which apply to every page of the University website. A good starting point when carrying out any keyword/phrase research is to check out the list of central words to avoid any duplication.
The second part of keyphrase planning is to identify a list of between 5-8 keywords that are appropriate for the individual webpage you are working on. These words should reflect the copy you have written and should help a potential user to find the information you have displayed.
A great way to plan and implement your keyphrases is to set up a spreadsheet to track individual pages. This forms part of the search engine optimisation (SEO) work for all webpages and a SEO plan has been sent to all Marketing Practitioners to implement on the pages they own.
When planning your keyphrases, there are a number of factors to consider. Think about how people are likely to search for the information contained within your pages. Try and think how other people would search for the information, not the people in your office so try and avoid using acronyms or specialist terms and phrases (or if you do, make sure you explain what they mean for those people who may not be familiar with them).
Consider local dialects and spelling variations for certain words and also consider plural forms of certain words.
Keyword stemming involves thinking of a specific keyword and then adding to that in order to help narrow a search. Examples of keyword stemming include plurals, prefixes and suffixes and modifiers.
Examples:
People search for things in very different ways. There are those that know exactly what they want when they commence a search and these people will often be highly motivated with as clear idea of the search words they need to use to find the information. Other users will not really know what they want from their search and are likely to be ‘window shoppers’ trying to find some information about a general subject.
Long tail searches are those where a person knows what they want and will use very specific words to form a keyphrase by which to find the information they are searching for.
Short tail searches are those where a person does not really know what they are looking for so will more than likely use a single word to commence their search. They may return later to add more words to their search and create a longer ‘tail’ and to narrow down their results.
Both ways of searching have benefits to copywriters. Long tail searches give very specific results and these are easier for a copywriter to target with very specific terms. Short tail searches produce a huge amount of results but how many of those searchers have real intent? And, how competitive can we be for words such as ‘degree’ which deliver millions of searches every month?