The
Keys to Great Keywords
If
you want lots of traffic to your website, get top ranking on the
search engines.
If
you want top ranking on the search engines, get great keywords.
Keywords
are the words that people type into their search engines to find
the websites that have the information they're looking for. The
search engines rank websites or web pages to define which websites
are the most relevant to the keyword that the person is using in
their search. The methods they use for ranking are varied and there
are as many variations as there are search engines.
The
secret to getting your website found by the searcher lies in first
defining the best keywords and keyword phrases for you. The trick
is to find the keywords that aren't too broad or too narrow of a
definition.
If
your search term is too narrow or too well defined chances are
nobody will ever type it into a search engine to find you. For example,
"real estate agent in Oopalala, Florida, with red hair"
is a well defined, extreeeemly narrow search term. Who would ever
use it?
Too
broad of a search term will put your website in competition
with kajillions of other websites. For instance, a search on Google
for "coach" returned 7,320,000 web pages in their results.
How's that for competition? Narrowing the definition of the keyword
phrase to "life coach" brought the competition down to
only 1,430,000 web pages. Much better. A little more tweaking to
refine the keyword phrase to "life and business coach"
returned only 738,000 web pages. Better yet.
Keep
in mind that although the number of search returnslooks like a lot
of competition, it's web pages, not web sites. Also,
the first results returned by a search engine are deemed to be the
most relevant for the particular search term. So the further a searcher
goes into the pages of results, the less relevant they are going
to be to her search inquiry. Try this yourself. Look at some of
the results on the very last pages of returns on a search engine.
You wonder how the search engines even figured that this had anything
to do with what you are searching for.
An
important note on searcher behavior: they rarely go past the
first three pages of returns on search engines. That's why it's
so important to get your website listed within those pages. After
scanning the first three pages of results, the searcher will either
refine their search term and try again, or will try another search
engine.
To
find the best keyword phrases for your website do do some research:
-
First, take a few moments to put yourself in the shoes (or head)
of your typical customer or client. Then write down a few of the
keywords and phrases you think they'd use to locate businesses,
products, or services like yours.
- Next,
try them out in several of the major search engines such as Yahoo!,
MSN, Google, and AOL. Note how many websites or webpages are returned.
These are your competition.
- Then
go to some of the top ranked websites to see if they are the same
kind of websites as yours. If the results are not aligned with
the subject matter and content of your website, then this is a
good indication that your keywords and phrases need some redefining.
There
are some online services to help you in your search for The Perfect
Keywords for your website. Wordtracker
Keyword Tool has a free trial that is a limited edition of their
full service and is worth trying out. It not only offers variations
of search terms for you, it also analyzes which would be the best
for you. GoodKeywords
has a nifty little program that you can download for free. You type
in a word and it returns variations of the word that can be used
as search terms.
Copyright
©2008 If
you would like to use this article, please
ask. More than likely I'd be happy to share it, and I would
like you to honor my work by allowing me to give it to you.
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