There are many online marketing tactics you can employ to drive traffic to your website or brand profile, but you can’t underestimate the importance of keywords.

Choosing Keywords for Social Media Marketing and SEO

In paid search, choosing the right keywords can be the difference between a campaign that delivers results at a great ROI and a campaign that just costs you money; in search engine optimisation (SEO), choosing the right keywords can help you to achieve search engine rankings, resulting in increased visitors from natural search results, and increased sales; and on your blog, compelling headlines that are keyword-rich have the potential to attract many more visitors than just compelling headlines by themselves.

All of this means choosing the right keywords is absolutely crucial when building links to your website. In fact, in the 2009 SEOmoz Search Ranking Factors survey, the number one factor as agreed by SEO experts was ‘Keyword-focused anchor text from external links’.

We know that many things can drive external links, including press releases and articles: so do your press release and article headlines contain appropriate keywords, and are these also included in the content? Are you using keywords in your social profile links and signatures? And have you thought about how important keywords are in other areas?

If optimised correctly for the right keywords, YouTube videos can also appear in the search results for relevant phrases and more people will find the video via a search on YouTube. Are you generating as many viewers by including relevant keywords in the video title, description and in the assigned tags? If not, you may not be leveraging this media as much as possible.

Real-time results such as those from Twitter are also now included in the search results. If you are in a competitive industry, this offers another opportunity to be seen in the search results for relevant phrases.

The use of brand keywords is absolutely essential for online reputation management success in the search engines. And by including keywords in social profiles and leveraging those profiles, you can increase the number of positive results for brand-based keyword searches.

Keywords are of extreme importance in so many ways. So it’s important to take advantage of these opportunities to optimise and increase results.

Grant Osborne, First Rate’s Director of Strategy & Performance, will expand on this topic at the Social Media Junction event on 17 May.