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, 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
GoTo’s Search Term Suggestion List
http://inventory.goto.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
GoTo, 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 GoTo 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. (Note: GoTo frequently moves the list.)
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.
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
SpecialistsTM. Over the past few years,
she has trained over 1000 people in her online and onsite courses in search
engine positioning strategies and has written three books that can be ordered
through Amazon. Visit the Academy's training Website to learn more about their
online courses: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.
