There are several things to consider when choosing keywords and phrases. The most important is to put yourself in the shoes of the type of visitor you want to attract. What is your target audience doing when they go online? What are they looking for? Make a list of what kind of keywords or phrases they are likely to search on. This requires you to separate yourself from your product, service, or Web site and think like the average Joe who might want to find you but knows nothing about your site.
Wordtracker is the best place to begin your keyword research, because it takes the guess work out of choosing keywords. You'll know which keywords are searched on the most and which have the lowest competing numbers.
It's also a good idea to ask friends or co-workers what they might type in a search engine to find your site. Or, have them go to a search engine and try to find information on the topic your site happens to cover. Watch what words and phrases they use.
Important things you'll want to remember when picking keywords to target:
1. CONCEPTS:
Include concept keywords such as "accounting software" if that's what you sell, but also try and be specific enough so that it's not too broad.
2. BRANDS:
Include specific brand names such as Quicken. If you offer services, try to use service brand names when possible. Legally, you should put the ® reserved symbol or ™ trademark symbol after the names when mentioning them on the page.
3. COMPANY NAMES:
If you offer products from a well-known company, include that company's name in your keywords.
4. YOUR NAME:
Unless you are a well-known company/organization such as Microsoft or Hewlett Packard, it's generally less important to emphasize your name as a keyword. You should, however, set up an "About My Company/Organization" page that uses your name so that someone searching for you will find that page.
5. COMMON WORDS:
There are now so many pages and words indexed on the Web that a search on many common words such as "software" or "Internet" are going to be completely ignored for that search by the engine. Therefore, most people have to search on two- or three-word phrases to find what they're looking for. Trying to be listed well on every phrase/keyword combination potential visitors might search for is next to impossible. However, WebPosition lets you target many more keywords and monitor them than you'd otherwise be able to manage by hand.
6. TEST KEYWORDS:
Ideally, before you even start a new Internet Web site (or even after), you should see how many other pages match the keywords people would likely search on to find you. The fewer matches found for your search, the easier it will be to get your site ranked at the top. Also important are the quality of the matches that appear. Your keywords may only bring up a lot of garbage that your potential audience would have no interest in anyway. Therefore, with the proper strategy, you could be the only site of your type that appears near the top of that search. WebPosition's detail report will let you see what competing pages/sites you are up against. There may be phrases that people are likely to search for which are much easier to achieve good rankings on than more common words and phrases. This strategy can gain you unexpected traffic.
7. PHRASES:
As mentioned previously, many people will likely use multiple word phrases to find your site, particularly when single words do not provide an adequate scope for the search. The syntax for this varies by engine, but generally phrases are searched for by surrounding them with quotes. Therefore, make a list of 2-3 word phrases people are likely to search for. When placing keywords on your page, make sure you always include them in a phrase that the visitor might use.
Keep the important words chained together in sentences on the page. If the user searches on "keyword1" AND "keyword2," then you only have to have the words in the same proximity on the page. If, however, they search on "keyword1 keyword2" along with the surrounding quotes, then the words MUST be together on your page, preferably multiple times to find a match. Therefore, it's a good idea to create a WebPosition Gold Reporter Mission to monitor your position for both "baseball cards" and just baseball cards, as an example.
Optimizing your page for phrase searches can do wonders in helping people find you. Because of the many combinations, it has traditionally been an impossible task without a tool like WebPosition to help you monitor your results.
It's often difficult to rank well for popular keywords. However, few sites make serious efforts to optimize for common phrases, leaving you with great opportunities to increase your traffic.
Sidenote:
Several Web site log programs will now tell you which keyword/phrase a user typed in a search engine to find you. This is often helpful in understanding which keyword phrases are translating into traffic to your site.
8. BAD SPELLING CAN BE GOOD:
Search engines don't have spell checkers. Also, product names can have slight variations. For example, MicroLogic has a product called Info Select. However, people could easily search on MicroLogic, Micro Logic, Infoselect, or Info Select. Look for obvious mistakes people are likely to make, and incorporate some of them into one of your pages in some way to pick up traffic you'd otherwise miss.
9. TRAFFIC ANALYZER:
Counts how many people found you on each search engine and what keyword(s) they used to find you. This can be very helpful in determining what keywords people are using to find your site. Unfortunately, it won't tell you what keywords people are searching on and NOT finding you, but it's a start. From there, you'll be able to see certain words you hadn't realized people would use to look for you. You can then optimize pages for those keywords for other search engines. In addition, you can add them to the Reporter feature of Gold to make sure you maintain good rankings on those words.
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