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.
Let's briefly look at some tips on choosing keywords. Then, at the bottom of this article, you'll find a link to a more in depth article on choosing keywords.
Optimize each page separately.
Stay away from general keywords.
Consider your individual goods or services.
Take a general keyword and add a specific word to it.
Consider regional keywords.
Different terminology?
What keywords are your competitors using?
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.
Search for your keyword phrase at the engines
Subscribe to WordTracker.com!
Click here for a more detailed article on choosing keywords, including more specific information about many of the points made here.
This article was written by Robin Nobles, Director of Training at the Academy of Web SpecialistsTM. Over the past few years, she has trained over 1000 people in her online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies. Visit this website to learn more: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.
