Article: Choosing the Right Keywords Adds up to Success for Your Web Site

Choosing the Right Keywords
Adds up to Success for your Website!

By Robin Nobles


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 the "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 finetuned 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 that traffic may not convert to 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/, then
click on Search Term Suggestion Tool.

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.


Subscribe to WordTracker.com!
http://www.academywebspecialists.com/wt

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. And, at WordTracker, you can learn how
many people actually searched for the keyword phrase at
AltaVista or any of the other major engines.


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 Specialists (http://www.academywebspecialists.com).
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 on the subject, which can be ordered through Amazon.
For more information about her online courses, visit the Academy's site:
http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.