Selecting effective keywords to gain high traffic to your site:

Generally, the more specific you can be, the better. On the other hand, you don't want to use keywords that are too unique, because no one will ever think to look for them. Use keywords that someone who has never heard of you, but who would be interested in what you offer, is likely to search for.

Your keywords are crucial, and you only get one chance with each search engine. Here's a very effective technique that uses brainstorming, distillation and competitive research to develop a powerful list of keywords:

• First, make a list of 50 words that describe your business and might be words that people would type in if they were searching for your product or service. Just put down the first things that come to mind until you have 50. Don't spend a lot of time worrying about how appropriate they are. Just do a little brainstorming with yourself and keep writing until you have 50.
  
  
• Second, remove all the words that appear in the name of your site. (Your listing will include these anyway). Take the top 20 remaining keywords and prioritize them, with the most important first.
  
  
• Third, get online and go to a major Internet search engine. Yahoo is a good place to start, but it is a directory and therefore carries a limited amount of information. Next, try Altavista, Excite, Go.com, Hot Bot and Google. Try searching for each of the 20 words and keep track of how many listings you get for each one. Look at the listings you get back for each search, perhaps follow a few links, and see how the sites compare to your Web site. This will give you a good idea of what your competitors are doing, and how they're listing their Web sites.
  
  
• Fourth, start searching for combinations of keywords. Try combining the first two on your list. Try other combinations based on the numbers you got back for each individual word. Try each of your first few words combined with other words on your list. You'll probably discover some combinations that will give you more of an exclusive listing combination that only return a few other listings. If you find certain combinations that (1) would likely be searched for by your prospects and (2) don't return many other listings, by all means make note of these. These are called "power combinations."
  
  
• Fifth, you may want to change the priority of your keywords based on what you find. So go ahead and re-prioritize your 20 top keywords.
  
  
• Sixth, once you have a good list, you can significantly expand is for additional choices by an excellent new tool, WordTracker Wordtracker is an essential tool to discover what search terms are actually being used in the major search engines.
  Use this tool to search for words that you had not thought about. You may even find better ones than the top 20 you can up with.
  
  Of course you are not limited to 20 keywords, you can us as many as possible to drive the traffic to your site from the search engines. Whatever people may be typing in is whatever you want to have emphasized somewhere on your site.

Now, where do your keywords go?

For a comprehensive answer to this question look here.

In this article we focus just at your description on the site and in your HTML description tag. Many Internet directories limit your description to around 25 words. So, your description needs to be packed with appropriate keyword phrase you are targeting.

Be precise in your use of the keyword phrase and have it a part of exact, accurate content related to the keyword phrase. Remember, your description describes your Web site and needs to pull the visitor to your site.

Now, you'll need to create several versions of your description.

• First, try and create a description using five or six of your keywords, but emphasizing one keyword.
• Second create a description that is limited to 25 words. Use as many of your highest priority keywords as possible.
• Third, develop a 10-word description using your highest priority keyword phrase.

You now have several versions of your site description that you can use when you are submitting to the search engines and the directories . The reason you've developed several versions of your description is that different directories have different limits on the length of descriptions. Some permit limited descriptions, and others limit to just 15-25 words. Also, there are other places and methods on the Internet for you to promote your Web site, so some of your descriptions can be used in other ways, such as for classified advertising.

But, your 10 word description will go in your description meta tag, your title and if possible, on the top of your home page as a header. Remember that the Internet search engines are out there looking for your page, and you need a way to let them know how to describe it. And making sure that your description has your website keywords within it.

Terry G. Plank, Director of Marketing at the Academy of Web Specialists^TM, and President of Whistler Enterprises, an integrated Web marketing company in Half Moon Bay, California. The Academy's domain Online Web Training provides Website evaluation and promotion to measurably increase search engine ranking and website findability and business effectiveness.