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| Smart Web Center - Basic Search Engine Tutorial |
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Selecting Good Keywords
Choosing good keywords to use in the written material of your website can really improve the results you get from search engines. If you are not using good keywords that people are looking for, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be you will not see increased numbers of visitors from search engines. So your first step in your search engine strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and keyword phrases. Make a List of Possible Keywords The first thing you have to realize is that the keywords people use might not be what you think they are. Your opinion doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what your potential customers or visitors use as keywords or keyword phrases to find what you offer. Start by asking other people what they would type in to a search engine to look for your products or services. Since they don't know the language of your particular area of expertise or product lines, they often come up with words or phrases that are very different from what you would. You can also visit these Keyword Suggestion tool pages and type in the keywords you have so far. It will give you variations that may be good keywords for you. Google Keyword Suggestion Tool Wordtracker's Keyword Suggestion Tool Overture's Keyword Suggestion Tool Evaluate Your Keywords The next thing to do is evaluate the list of keywords and phrases that you have gathered. The objective of your evaluation process it to narrow down your list of keywords and phrases to a short list that will result in the highest number of quality visitors to your website. A quality visitor is a person that is actively looking for what you have to offer so they can make a purchase or use your services. It may be thrilling to have huge numbers of visitors, but if they are just surfing sites with no intention of buying they just use up your monthly bandwidth. When you are evaluating keywords, you are evaluating in terms of popularity and specificity. Keyword Popularity Popularity is easy to evaluate. You simply get a count of how often a particular keyword or phrase is typed into a search engine. The most popular search terms are used the most often. The idea is that the higher the number of searches for a keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. This is true only if your site appears in the first few pages of the search engine results for that keyword or phrase. The most popular keywords usually result in hundreds of pages of search results and if you are on the last page of those results your site will never even be seen. So you have to compare the popularity of the keyword against the number of competing sites. To get a count of competing sites, just go to Google.com and type in your keyword. Google will report the number of results at the top of the page. You can purchase software that will help you with this process, showing you the number of times a keyword or phrase was searched for in real search engines. Some software will suggest variations of your words and phrases, and will also give you a listing of how many competing sites there are. Keyword Specificity The second criteria is specificity. A rule of thumb is that the more specific your keyword or phrase is, the greater the likelihood that the visitor using it is seriously looking for what you have to offer. Here's an example. Your website specializes in automobile parts. You find that the keyword "automobile" is very popular. The keyword "automobile" is far more popular than "automobile parts" but you will get people looking for all kinds of things related to automobiles instead of just people looking for automobile parts. Even that might not be specific enough. If you sell Honda parts, "Honda automobile parts" may be an even better choice. You want to try to find keywords and phrases that people who are ready to act or make a purchase are likely to use, with the greatest popularity and the least amount of competition so you can make your keyword strategy really count. Some Final Notes About Keywords If you are a business, don't forget to use your business name and location as keywords and keyword phrases. This is because people use search engines like a phone book to find your company online. Once you have implemented your keyword and keyword phrase strategy, you may want to invest in software or tracking services to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in the various search engines. This type of software tracks where your visitors came from and whether their visit resulted in a purchase or registration. Remember: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; qualified visitor do. You need to find keywords that bring visitors to your site who actually want your offerings, buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. The nice thing about a website is that you can test for what works. With print and traditional advertising it is very costly to change your copy and reprint it. With a website, you can tweak your keywords and web pages and improve your results as you focus in on what really works well. |