Choosing the Right Keywords for Your Site
Keyword selection is probably the most critical step of search engine optimization. Yet most businesses focus more on the techniques needed to get their web pages to rank in the top 20 of the major search engines without stopping to consider what keywords they'd like to place under in the first place.
In case you are unfamiliar with the term keyword or keyword phrase, let's talk a little about them. When a visitor goes to a search engine and does a search, he/she types in a keyword or keyword phrase describing the content they are interested in finding. For example I could do a search for the word "cars" to find car dealers online; however I'd probably find too many results to sort through. In addition to information about car dealers in my area, I'd get information about car parts, race cars, model cars, antique cars, and on and on. I'd get much better results if I made my search more specific and typed in a phrase like "used subarus" or "pre-owned Porsches" instead. Phrases are more specific and web visitors find out quickly how to make their searches as specific as possible in order to get the best search engine results.
As a search engine optimizer, you need to learn the art of thinking like your customer. What would you type in if you were a potential customer of a business like yours? Try to think as if you've never heard your company name before and come up with a list of keyword phrases that describes the products or services you offer. For example if you sell restaurant supplies you might want to score well in the search engines for cookware, cooking supplies, pots and pans, culinary tools, restaurant supply, gourmet items, gourmet cooking items, cooking equipment, etc. Make a list of at least 20 keyword phrases that describe your business in general and also describe specific aspects of your business. Try to be as specific as possible without limiting what someone might type in too much.
After you have a list of 20 or so, try to think of a few more. Ask friends, colleagues and others what they might type in to find your business without showing them your list. Brainstorm as many more potential keyword phrases as you can, even if they sound totally ridiculous.
Next, go to your competitor's websites and check their meta tags for even more ideas on the keywords and phrases you might use. To see the meta keyword tag for a particular web page, just go to View and then Source in Internet Explorer or go to View and then Page Source in Netscape. A text window will open in front of you. Look for a tag near the top of the page that looks something like this:
<meta name="Keywords" content="gourmet items, gourmet utensils, culinary tools, restaurant supply, chef tools, pots and pans, frying pans">
You'll probably find words in your competitor's tags you may not have thought of otherwise. Once you have a decent list of words, start going to the search engines and typing in each of the keyword phrases you've thought of. See if you find sites that compete with you in the list of results. If you do, you're probably on the right track. You can also check these web pages for meta tags as described above for even more possible keyword phrases.
Finally, try to find as many synonyms as you can for the words you have so far. You will also want to include misspellings and different variations of keywords in your own meta tags when you build your pages. Different variations include differences in case, plurals, hyphenated versions, etc.
This is a guessing game. You'll have no idea, when you start, what potential customers are likely to type in, yet you need to optimize your pages for what they "might" type in anyway. This gives you the best chance of being found. Finding as many words as you can, will help you accomplish this goal much more easily.
Now once you have a list of potential keyword phrases that visitors may type in to find a site like yours, you'll need to find out how popular these keyword phrases are and how much competition you have. This is important because you don't want to target keywords that no one ever types in. This would be a waste of time. Likewise, you don't want to target a keyword that is so competitive that you'll never have a chance of ranking in the top 20. There are several ways you can determine the popularity of your keyword phrases and evaluate how much competition you have. Some methods are free, others cost a little money.
Method #1 - Overture's keyword tool - Overture.com, one of the biggest pay-per-click search engines on the web offers a free keyword popularity tool to subscribers of their service. You may have to sign up for an Overture account to find the tool, however. The Overture keyword popularity tool will give you a rough idea of how many people have typed in a given keyword phrase over the past 2 months. The higher the number the more people have typed it in and the more potential traffic your site could receive. Overture's popularity tool will also give you synonyms of phrases that you type in that you may not have thought of. Write these phrases down, as well as the number of times they've been typed into the search engines. Once you know how many times a keyword phrase has been typed in, you'll need to know how much competition you have for each phrase. To do this for free, just go to the search engine of your choice, type your keyword phrase in quotes and do a search. Most search engines will tell you the total number of sites it found that contain that keyword. They'll say something like Found 10 of 40,329 results. It's important to enclose your keywords in quotes when looking for competition, because you only want to see the sites it finds that contain ALL of the words in your keyword phrase.
Method #2 - Wordtracker - A much easier way to find out what keyword phrases are the best to target is to use a tool called Wordtracker. For under $10 for a single use, Wordtracker pays for itself with unmatched keyword intelligence you just can't get anywhere else. If you plan on optimizing many sites, you may want to signup for one of their subscription programs that allow you to use the tool for 3 months, 6 months or a year. Wordtracker will take the keyword phrases you type in, give you a list of synonyms and then let you know how much competition you have for each keyword phrase. It even analyses your results and puts your keyword phrases in order from best to worst. This tool is invaluable if you want to know precisely which words to target. It will show you which words have the most traffic and the least competition to give you the best chance of ranking in the top 20. Having this information gives you the best edge over your competitors who may waste time targeting phrases that are too competitive, or not popular enough. To see Wordtracker in action, just visit: www.wordtracker.com.
No matter which method you decide to use, determining the popularity and potential competition of the keyword phrases you choose to target is an important step in choosing the right keywords for search engine optimization. Once you've decided on the right keyword phrases, you'll be several steps ahead of many of your competitors and within a short period of time will reap the benefits of your optimization efforts.
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