 Keyword Optimization
- How To Achieve It
By
Elizabeth
McGee © 2005
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.
About the Author:
| Elizabeth McGee
strives to help webmasters and business owners find trusted marketing tools
while also offering tips, strategies 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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