Like everyone else who owns a web site, you want your web site to appear in the top ten of Google search results. Regrettably, only very few people possess the skills to actually achieve it. There are many steps to take in order to be found for keywords associated with your web site. And, taking your time to explore the best possible keywords for your site is an important rung on the ladder.
You can easily make the slip-up of assuming that a ranking for one generic term related to their website will turn their site into a commercial success. Although that one generic term could provide a fine stream of traffic and brand awareness, this doesn’t imply the traffic will be targeted traffic that will convert into sales or even sign up for your newsletter. Not only that, but the expenses of targeting that term may well tower over your long term profits. It is best for you to target various terms related to your product’s benefits or the problems your product solves. This will not only drive traffic, but also produce a significant amount of conversion.
First of all you need to consider who your prospects are and the benefits they will receive for visiting your site. Do you advertise products online? Do you offer services? Is your website more information focused? Who would benefit and why would they benefit from your site? By understanding your potential visitors and why they will visit you will better focus your efforts on important keywords.
With that as a goal, you can now consider the benefit or problem specific terms that you think people will use in searches to find your website. You shouldn’t be content with simply one term. This is a snare that lots of webmasters fall into as they believe that a single keyword will provide enough traffic to sustain a business. And they are surprised that their business does not improve if they do attain that ranking. Consider all of the promising keywords and themes of your site, even use a thesaurus to find related words and phrases. You can also check rival websites for ideas. It can be amazing just what keywords your potential visitors will be using!
Once you have assembled a list of specific terms, you’ll need to check some web resources to estimate how widely used and competitive those terms are. And, you’ll start to sharpen up those keywords to be more targeted to your web site’s purpose.
The first step is to determine how widely used your keywords are. This step can be completed using numerous keyword suggestion tools.
Keyword suggestion tools inform you which keywords were typed into searches, and the number of searches that were performed on those words and phrases. Entering a phrase in the resource will result in a collection of alternative words and phrases that contain your term, alternative phrases with a similar theme and also an estimate of the magnitude of traffic each expression produces per month. These resources can be flawed as they interrogate different search engines and the traffic estimations can be imprecise, but they are still useful for trying to get a ball park estimate of the number of searches performed, and for suggesting multiple words and phrases you might never have thought of targeting.
Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, located at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is free to use and gives you a list of suggested keywords as well as the amount of searches conducted on Google.
A similar tool is located at http://www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the metacrawlers Dogpile and Metacrawler. So the numbers might not be representative of what’s being searched on the web as a whole. But Wordtracker is still beneficial for offering alternative phrases and related phrases. Wordtracker is not a free resource. Wordtracker offers monthly or annual subscriptions.
Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com is a comparative newcomer to the keyword suggestion marketplace. KeywordDiscovery can query multiple search engines worldwide and produces comparable results to Wordtracker as well as other services, but with prices starting at $69.95 per month. You can sample this service for free but you’ll get only a subset of the results you would get as a paid member.
Once you’ve got a list of terms, you’ll need to see how competitive they are. What you;re hoping to find here are keywords that have high volume traffic but a small number of websites competing to rank for that term. You can use a variety of tricks to determine this. Competitive pages that are optimized for a term will without doubt have that term in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site. So by doing a search in Google and entering the queries intitle:“phrase here” and inanchor:“phrase here”, you can determine the number of other pages that have been optimized for your selected keyword. The smaller the results for these searches, the less competition there is for the term. For more information about what these Google advanced search operators do, visit http://google.about.com/od/googlepowersearches/Google_Power_Searches.htm.
After using these resources you’ll have a list of keywords that are significantly more targeted than your initial phrases. These keywords can include breaking your term down by regional position, or a specific product. You will be able to optimize your website for multiple phrases – remember that search engines index each of your pages and not only websites. That means all of the pages in your site can be found in search engines, and this means that every one of your pages can be optimized for distinctive terms!
You may also want to consider the “long tail” search phrases. These are very specific multi word phrases that are use infrequently in searches, but are so precise they can wind up being very targeted terms and thus produce higher conversion rates. In order to include long tails phrases you must have a information rich site – the more information you have the more opportunities you have to include very specific phrases that can be found in your copy.
So you should now at last have a list of the most effective targeted phrases for your site! It should be clear now that the process of choosing your keywords in not something that should be considered quickly. There is a lot of work to carry out if you desire to optimize the capability of your website to draw organic search traffic. With your concluding list you will now be ready to rework your pages to be found for those keywords, but that is an additional subject.
You’ll discover more information about successful pay per click advertising, getting free traffic to your website and more at the author’s websites. You’ll find revealing articles, stimulating videos, and helpful products.
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