The most important thing you can do for your
business and your website is develop relevant
keywords that are not too competitive yet generate
targeted traffic to your website.
It's called keyword optimization. Why is it important?
Because Keywords and keyword phrases do a couple
of things for you:
- With the right keywords, you will attract the viewers
most interested in the items or services on your site.
- You will rank higher in the search engines for your
chosen keywords, saving you thousands of dollars
in advertising.
It all starts, however, with the best keywords that pertain
to your product or services.
When selecting keywords you should select 1 perhaps
2 of the most relevant keywords for each page of your
site. I suggest using no more than two keywords per
page, preferably one.
Why?
Because search engines strive to deliver the most relevant
pages for the search term entered. The more focused your
page is for the search term, the more relevant the search
engines will find your page. The more keywords you use,
the less focused your page becomes.
How do you find keywords that your target audience will use?
- Think like your readers. Take yourself outside your site
for a minute and think about how you would find the
products or services you are selling.
- Use Overture's Keyword Selector Tool
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Type in your most basic keyword and it will show you the
variations of the search term and also the count of how many
times that term was entered in the search engine.
- Think of phrases as opposed to one single word. If you
sell clay pots, think of keywords such as painted clay pots,
or clay flower pots, large clay pots, buy clay pots.
Use descriptive words when brainstorming phrases.
- Ask your relatives, kids and friends what they would type
in to find your products. You would be amazed at the great
ideas that can be generated. For example, I asked a
teenager once what he would type in to find shoes online and
he said 'nice kicks'. As of this writing, Overture's keyword
selector tool showed a count of 12130. Hmmm, never
would have thought of it on my own.
- Use a thesaurus or Webster's dictionary to find
similar words to your chosen keywords. Consider all
forms of the word. For example, for the term supply there
is supply, supplies, supplier, supplying. Thinking of all
forms of the word help a great deal in brainstorming
keyword ideas.
- If you have a website already, place a search engine on
your site. This would be a search engine that you put on
your site that searches only your site such as
http://www.freefind.com/. This will help you collect data
on what keywords users are using. Once you've collected a
good list of search terms you can use this to help you
determine the best keywords.
Along this same line, you can also use your website server
logs to gather information on the keywords used to find your
site.
Once you've made a list of the best keywords and keyword
phrases, you will need to determine which ones are the best.
Your challenge is to find keywords that have a high usage count
but appear on the least amount of competing web pages.
Wordtracker.com is an excellent tool for helping you achieve
this. Wordtracker's 'Keyword Effectiveness Index' (KEI) will
provide you with the number of times a keyword is used along
with the number of competing web pages. The higher the KEI,
the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition.
This means a better chance for you in getting to the top of the
search engines.
Finding the best keywords and keyword phrases is an important
part of your marketing mix. Find the correct keywords and build
your content around them.
Elizabeth McGee strives to help webmasters and business owners
find trusted marketing tools while also offering tips, stragegies and information for online marketing. Sign up for
her FREE newsletter by visiting her site at:
http://www.pro-marketing-online.com
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