Choosing Keywords
By George Manty |
Keywords are words that people use to find your website. Keywords are the words
entered into the search field of a Search Engine to search for website pages
related to or including those words. For example, if you are looking for blue
shoes, you would type “blue shoes” into a Search Engine and find websites
related to “blue shoes”. The phrase “blue shoes” is called a keyword phrase. To
increase your Search Engine traffic you should choose a 1-3 word keyword phrase
for each individual page of your website. You also should choose two or three
keyword phrases that constitute the overall theme of your website.
Methods of Choosing Keywords
Choosing good
keywords is vital to increasing your website traffic. Before choosing which
keywords to focus on, you should brainstorm possible keywords that people might
use to find your website. After brainstorming keywords, then use a thesaurus to
come up with more words. You can also use a tool like the Google® Sandbox Tool.
Enter in keywords and the Google® Sandbox Tool will return a list of words it
believes are related words. Other websites including, NicheBot, and Wordtracker
offers a similar service as well.
Another method of finding keywords is
to take a look at your competitors websites, and determine what keywords they
are targeting. One method of doing this is to take a look at their keywords meta
tag. In Internet explorer you can do this by:
1.Clicking on the top
pulldown menu “View”.
2.Scrolling down and click on the menu item “Source”.
This will show you the source code for that page. Then look for a line
that looks like this:
This example uses the keywords meta tag for the
home page of our dinosaur website. The words after “content=” are the keywords
that are considered important by the person (in this case me) who wrote the HTML
for the page. From this meta tag you can find out some of the keywords that are
being targeted on the page. Add any keywords used in this tag to your list.
Once you have your list of keywords it's time to find out if anyone
searches for them. You can do this by using the Overture® search term suggestion
tool. The Overture® search term suggestion tool shows you how many times a
certain keyword was searched for the previous month. You can use this tool to
find out how many times people search for keywords related to your website. For
example, go to the Overture® search term suggestion tool and type in “dinosaur”.
Then click the button to the right. You will now see a screen that shows a big
table of keyword phrases that include the word dinosaur. Here is an example
snippet of the list for September 2004:
109644 dinosaur
15899
dinosaur picture
8433 dinosaur costume
5548 dinosaur game
5419
barney the dinosaur
5018 dinosaur fossil
4575 dinosaur toy
The
number to the left is the number of times people searched for a particular
keyword. The words to the right of the numbers are the keyword phrases that were
searched for.
One thing you will notice is that most people search using
only one or two keywords, sometimes 3 or 4. So at this point in time, optimizing
your site for keyword phrases longer than 3-4 words is a waste of time.
Special Note: Research suggests that people who use longer keyword phrases
(3 or more words) are more likely to buy products. This is probably because they
are more likely to be looking for a specific product.
Another important
note is that the Overture® tool does not distinguish between singular and plural
keywords.
Using the example above you can see that people searched for
dinosaur over 100,000 times in September. The dinosaur business is fairly
competitive for the keywords “dinosaur” and “dinosaurs”. In retrospect, I would
have done better to have optimized our site for the keywords “dinosaurs for
kids”, rather than “dinosaur time machine”. That way we could have become highly
ranked for the keywords “dinosaurs for kids” (which we are currently in Google®,
Yahoo®, and MSN®). The word “dinosaurs” is contained in the phrase “dinosaurs
for kids”, which means we eventually would have been ranked higher for the word
“dinosaurs” as well.
* Google and Page Rank are registered trademarks of
Google Inc.
* Yahoo is a registered trademark of Yahoo Inc.
* MSN® is a
registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
* Overture is a registered
trademark of Overture Inc.
About the
Author
Choosing Keywords excerpted from "The Truth about
Website Promotion" Written by George Manty, owner of http://websitepromotionbook.com
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