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Determining Keywords
By S. Housley
Determining keywords is a critical step in web design. If your website and meta tags do not contain related keywords, web surfers will be unable to find your website when they conduct searches.
The formula is a little tricky - you will need to locate terms that are popular and relevant to your site. These terms may or may not be terms that *you* feel are relevant terms. The optimal terms in a site should be terms that a potential customer would use when searching for a website with your content. In order to achieve success your website should be optimized with terms and phrases that are descriptive, related to your content, and which receive a significant amount of searches. The caveat, of course, is that you want to find terms and phrases where there is little competition, so you quickly achieve high ranking in the important search engines.
Relevant + Popular With Searchers But Not With Competitors = Success
Markets saturated with other sites competing for search terms make it difficult to find quality keywords. Sometimes it is better to optimize for a less popular term, one that is more targeted at your visitor, because it is more likely to have a higher conversion rate than a less specific popular term. The first step to determining keywords is brainstorming a list of logical terms and phrases that relate to your product or offerings. This should be done by a number of individuals; sometimes people have very different ideas for search terms and by identifying a variety of people and their search terms you may tap words that hadn't occurred to you. There are a number of free and low-cost tools available online and for download that will allow you to expand and research terms that have been brainstormed. The results typically vary with the tools but overall the tools will assist you in determining where to focus your keyword efforts. The tools will often assist with pay-per-click engines, creating expanded, related keywords or phrases that can be bid on.
In addition to examining log files to see what terms customers are using to find a website, visit competitors' web sites and examine their meta tags for additional terms, use a thesaurus to find related terms, include misspellings of keywords in your meta tag keywords, and optimize for various forms of nouns and verbs, including tenses and plurals.
A method that I have found helpful is to download the Google Tool Bar if you don't already have it, then start typing in keywords relevant to the page you would like to optimize. The Google Tool Bar immediately give you suggestions according to what people have searched for on Google. I believe they show up in order of the most searches on Google. Once you have a keyword phrase that looks like it has a reasonable amount of searches, you need to see if there is too much competition. Click on the phrase to bring up the Google Search for that phrase. Then add quotation marks ("") on each side of the phrase and click SEARCH. This will give you the competition for that exact phrase. I look for under 100,000 results, if optimized properly you have a chance to rank in Google for that phrase. |
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Keyword Tools -
WordTracker - Wordtracker helps you choose the right internet marketing keywords that will help your search engine placement and ranking. Use Wordtracker for keyword research. Web marketing is all about search engine ranking, and that starts with the proper internet marketing keywords. Get a free keyword report and web site promotion information! For a step-by-step on how to use wordtracker, click here
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