Like everyone else who owns a website, you want your web site to show in the top ten of Google search results. Regrettably, only very few people have the knowledge to actually achieve this goal. You’ve got to do a number of things in order to be found for words and phrases associated with your website. And, spending time to investigate the best possible phrases for your web site is a significant rung on the ladder.
You can easily make the mistake of assuming that a ranking for one generic term associated with their site will turn their site into a profitable success. Although that one generic term can supply a fine flow of traffic and brand appreciation, this doesn’t imply the traffic will be targeted traffic that will make purchases or even sign up for your newsletter. Plus the expenses of targeting that term may well tower over your long term profits. It is best for you to target multiple keywords associated with your product’s benefits or the difficulties your product solves. This will not only drive traffic, but also result in that all important conversion.
The first thing you need to consider is who your prospects are and the reasons why they will visit your website. Do you sell products online? Do you suggest services? Is your site more content focused? Why would potential visitors benefit from visiting your website? Once you understand your audience and why they will visit you will better focus your efforts on important keywords.
With this in mind, you can now think about the benefit or problem specific keywords that you think people will use to try and find your site. You shouldn’t be content with simply a single keyword. This is a snare that many webmasters fall into when they sense that one term will provide enough traffic to sustain a business. And they are taken aback that their business doesn’t increase if they do attain that ranking. Reflect on all of the potential phrases and themes of your site, even use a thesaurus to locate associated words and phrases. You can also examine competitor websites for ideas. It can be amazing just what keywords your prospective visitors will use!
Once you have put together a list of specific terms, you can start using tools to determine how widely used and competitive those terms are. And, you’ll begin to polish those terms to be highly targeted to your web site’s purpose.
To start out you’ll research how widely used your keywords are. This step can be completed using numerous keyword suggestion tools.
Keyword suggestion tools tell you which terms were used in searches, and how many searches were conducted using those terms. Entering a phrase in the resource will return a variety of other keywords that contain your term, alternative phrases with a similar meaning and also an estimate of the magnitude of traffic each expression garners 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 getting a ball park estimation of the amount of searches conducted, and for suggesting multiple words and phrases you may never have thought of targeting.
Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, located at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is free to use and provides a list of suggested words and phrases as well as the volume of searches conducted on Google.
A similar tool is located at http://www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the metacrawlers Dogpile and Metacrawler. So the statistics possibly will not be representative of what’s being searched on the Internet as a whole. But Wordtracker is still beneficial for offering alternative keywords and associated phrases. Wordtracker has a subscription service. Wordtracker offers monthly or yearly subscriptions.
Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com is a comparative newcomer to the keyword suggestion market. KeywordDiscovery can query multiple search engines worldwide and provides comparable results to Wordtracker as well as other services, but with prices starting at $69.95 per month. You can sample this tool for free but you’ll get only a sample of the results you would get as a paid member.
The next step in picking the best terms is checking how competitive they are. Ideally you want to find keywords that have lots of traffic but few websites competing to rank for that term. You can use various tricks to determine this. Competitive pages that are optimized for an expression 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 using the queries intitle:“phrase here” and inanchor:“phrase here”, you can figure out how many other pages have been optimized for your preferred expression. 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 terms that are significantly more targeted than your first keywords. These keywords can include breaking your term down by geographical location, or a precise product. You should now be able to optimize your web site for multiple phrases – remember that search engines index each of your pages and not just websites. The result is that all of the pages in your website can be found in search engines, and this means that every one of your pages can be optimized for different terms!
Many people are also optimizing pages for “long tail” keyword phrases. These are very specific multi word phrases that are use infrequently in searches, but are so precise they can wind up being the most targeted terms and thus produce higher conversion rates. In order to include long tails phrases you must have a information rich site – the more content you have the more likely you are to be picked up for obscure terms that can appear somewhere on your site.
As a result you should now finally have a list of the best possible targeted phrases for your site! It should be clear now that the process of selecting your terms in not a task that should be taken lightly. There is considerable preparation to carry out if you want to maximize the capability of your website to attract natural search traffic. With your final list you will now be ready to develop your pages to be found for those keywords, but that is another topic.
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