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Choosing
the Right Keywords Adds Up to Success For Your Website!
by
Robin Nobles
What
is the single most important thing you can do to insure the success of your
website?
Choose the right keywords.
Why is that, with all of the highly effective search engine strategies that
we can employ? It’s rather simple. If you don’t choose the right keywords, all
of your other strategies won’t help you at all, because those strategies build
on top of choosing the right keywords.
Let’s look at it from the point of a view of a searcher. A searcher visits one
of the major engines looking for your goods or services. He types in what he
considers to be the most important topic, or keyword, for his search. Up come
the results, ten per page.
If you haven’t taken time to choose the most effective keyword phrases, you
may have done something like use the name of your company as your main keyword.
If your company has significant name recognition, like Sony, that’s fine. But,
if your company is like the vast majority of companies on the Net, optimizing
the page for the name of your company has just cost you some business.
Choose the most effective keyword phrase for your page!
How on earth do you choose your important keyword phrases? First off, don’t
depend on yourself to choose the right keywords. Your searchers are probably
not finding you the same way that you’d think they’d find you. Instead, ask
your customers or someone outside of your business what they would type in the
search window when looking for your site.
Optimize each page separately.
When working with search engines, consider the focus of each page separately,
because the engines do. So, if you want top ranked pages, create content-rich
information pages that center on one or two topics only, and use those fine-tuned
topics as your keywords for that page.
Don’t try to optimize a single page for every keyword that’s important to your
business. It just won’t work. Instead, create separate content-rich pages and
utilize your other keywords in that manner, and bring additional traffic into
your site.
Let’s look at some tips on how to choose keywords.
Stay away from general keywords.
Take your keyword ideas and fine tune them based on each page of your website.
While it’s tempting to choose very general keywords, like "computers,"
don’t do it for a number of reasons.
First off, the competition will be fierce. And, more and more searchers are
realizing that they can finetune their searches and cut out never-ending search
results by searching for phrases rather than single keywords.
Also, research has shown that when a searcher wants to purchase something, he
conducts extremely finetuned searches to find it. In other words, if he’s searching
for a DVD title by a particular actor, he’ll search for the exact title or under
the name of the actor, rather than simply "DVD."
So, while having a web page that ranks extremely well for a very general keyword
seems like the ideal situation, keep in mind that you may get more traffic,
but you won’t necessarily get more sales.
Consider your individual goods or services.
Some excellent keyword choices are the names of your individual goods and services.
For example, if you’re a professional writer, create pages that advertise your
services, such as "ghost writing" or "technical writing."
Creating a page for the very general keyword, "writing," actually
may not get you the business you want.
By the same token, don’t use trademarked terms for your competitors in your
tags. Trademark lawsuits are springing up faster than blemishes on a teenager’s
face, and you certainly don’t want, or need, to find yourself in the middle
of one.
Take a general keyword and add a specific word to it.
If you can only think of very general keywords, start with a list of those keywords,
and then add specific words to each one. For example, if you’re an artist, take
the general keyword of "art" and add a specific word or two to it,
based on your particular business. So, your keyword phrases may be "art
lessons for children" or "modern art."
Consider regional keywords.
Does your business cater to a particular region? If you have a restaurant in
New Orleans , for example, your keyword phrase should contain the name of the
city or state.
Different terminology?
Do people from other regions use different terminology when searching for your
keyword phrase? If so, utilize that terminology in your tags or on your page,
or create a separate page. For example, in the South, people call "shopping
carts" that you find in grocery stores "buggies."
What keywords are your competitors using?
Search for your competitors’ sites and see what keywords they’re using. Do NOT
copy their tags or anything else. Simply review their pages to see if they might
be using a keyword phrase that could be helpful to you.
Use online resources for ideas!
The Internet has some wonderful resources to help you consider what keywords
to use on your pages. Here are a few:
Roget's Internet Thesaurus: http://www.thesaurus.com/
Phrase Finder: http://www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases/
Once you’ve determined your keyword phrases, don’t stop there!
As mentioned earlier, just because you think that a keyword phrase is perfect
for your page, doesn’t mean that it is.
The bottom line here is, we’re after traffic to our sites. Even more to the
point, we’re after paying customers! So, if our keyword phrase is so fine tuned
that no one is using it, then it will do us no good, even if we have a #1 ranking
for it.
On the other hand, if our keyword phrase is too general, we may get traffic,
but we might not get paying customers.
Search for your keyword phrase at the engines
To determine how competitive your keyword phrase is, visit the search engines
and search for it. If you come up with 349 results, or five million results,
you may want to rethink your keyword strategy.
While this approach is certainly helpful, it is only telling you how many pages
have been optimized for that particular keyword phrase. However, there is frequently
a correlation between the number of pages that have been optimized for a particular
keyword phrase and how many people are searching for that phrase.
Visit Overture’s Search Term Suggestion List
http://www.overture.com/d/about/advertisers/clienttoolkit/
Overture, a pay-for-keyword search engine, offers a wonderful tool that allows
you to see how many people searched for your keyword phrase (or versions of
it) at Overture during the past month. Of course, this doesn’t tell you how
many people searched for the phrase at AltaVista or any of the other engines,
but it is certainly a good guide.
Subscribe
to WordTracker.com!
If you’re serious about your website, however, you want some serious information.
By utilizing their extensive database of actual keywords that people are searching
for, WordTracker.com allows you to work through your choices to see which will
bring you the most traffic.
For a FREE trial CLICK
HERE
In Closing
If you spend time choosing the best keywords for your web pages, it will add
up to traffic and sales for your online business!
This article was written by Robin Nobles, Director of Training at the Academy
of Web Specialists TM . Over the past few years, she has trained over 900 people
in her online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies.
Search
Engine Optimization: Keyword Analysis
The
first and most important step in gaining top
search engine rankings is choosing the right keywords
. Finding the right niche is crucial for top rankings. To accomplish
this critical phase of optimization we use WordTracker
.
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engine optimization professional uses these 2 tools.
Several
Important factors to keep in mind are that:
- a
good Keyword Effectiveness Index with little or no traffic is useless
- always
keep in mind the number of competitors for a particular search phrase
- every
engine ranks search phrases differently and all of the engines you want to
rank well in should be analyzed.
- just
because a search phrase doesn’t have a good KEI just mean you can’t get a
top ranking; It just means you have to work smarter and harder at it.
- And
finally time is money. It is often substantially more affordable and effective
to hire professionals like Inf-inet Business Solutions to do it for you.
If
you would Like to try a free trial of WordTracker: CLICK
HERE
If
you would Like to try a free trial of WebPosition Gold 2 CLICK
HERE
If
you would like to hire our professional team of search engine specialists CLICK
HERE
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