SEO Strategies: Keywords

A website's keywords are used to align your website with a user's search query - and ideally put your website high enough in the search engine's rankings that the user clicks on your site. Improving where a site lands in a search results page is the purview of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and while much goes into improving a site's SEO, selecting the best targeted keywords for your purpose rests at the heart of a good SEO strategy.

But what is a good keyword? Ideally, a good keyword (or keyword phrase) is one that has a high search volume, but a smaller amount of pages serving it. Your content, of course, should be aligned with your selected keywords.

Keyword Optimization

When trying to research keywords for my portfolio, I ran into an all too common problem: my site has similar content to many other web developer portfolios. Most portfolios will have sample projects, a resume, and contact page, amongst other common traits, and many will also have projects built with the same languages and frameworks. Given this, how could I find less competitive but still searched keywords?

To begin my keyword search, I considered my target audience, the purpose of the site, and the content of each web page. Since this is a professional portfolio, my target audience are recruiters and other developers. Thus, I researched job posting and resume keywords used by recruiters to find developers - and found a great article on ZipRecruiter that helped me generate some keywords such as "User Experience".

Since this is a portfolio site, my name (as it was pointed out to me) would serve as a great keyword. While the search volume may not be as high for the general public, it is plausible that recruiters or other developers would search for my name.

Finally, I looked at the content of my pages and picked out keywords that related to the content. However, this is where most of the research came in. I took my initial list and used resources including Ubersuggest and the extension Keywords Everywhere to learn about the search volume and SEO competitiveness. From this, I learned that my initial list of keywords included many words that were too competitive.

To improve my keywords, I focused on finding good keyword phrases - phrases that are more specific, and so less competitive. To ensure my keyword phrases are still being searched for, I used Google Trends to assess the popularity. Google Trends was very helpful in refining keyword phrases, as I could compare two similar phrases, and discover which one has a higher search volume. I then used Keywords Everywhere (Ubersuggest, after some time, requires a paid subscription) to ensure the phrase had a tolerable competitiveness.

Through this process I refined my keywords for my webpages, crafting a list that - while still fairly competitive - gives me more of a fighting chance to inch my way up the page rankings than when I brainstormed my initial list of keywords.

Selected Keywords