Keyword Research

Good, thorough keyword research means finding relevant keywords that are not too competitive yet generate targeted traffic to your website.

Keywords and keyword phrases do several things for you:

With the right keywords, you will attract viewers most interested in the items or services on your site. The right keywords can also boost search engine rankings saving you thousands of dollars in advertising.

It all starts with choosing the keywords that pertain to your product or services.

When selecting keywords you should select 1 perhaps 2 of the most relevant keywords for each page of your site. I suggest using no more than two keywords per page, preferably one.

Why?

Because search engines strive to deliver the most relevant pages for the search term entered. The more focused your page is for a search term, the more relevant the search engines will find your page. The more keywords you use, the less focused your page becomes.

How do you find keywords that your target audience will use?

Think like your readers. Take yourself outside your site for a minute and think about how you would find the products or services you are selling.

Think of phrases as opposed to one single word. If you sell clay pots, think of keywords such as "painted clay pots", or "clay flower pots", "large clay pots", "buy clay pots". Use descriptive words when brainstorming phrases.

Ask your relatives, kids and friends what they would type in to find your products. You would be amazed at the great ideas that can be generated. For example, I asked a teenager once what he would type in to find shoes online and he said 'nice kicks'. As of this writing, Overtures' Keyword selector tool showed a count of 12130. Hmmm, never would have thought of it on my own.

Use a thesaurus or Webster’s dictionary to find similar words to your chosen keywords. Consider all forms of the word. For example, for the term 'supply' there is supply, supplies, supplier, supplying. Thinking of all forms of the word helps a great deal in brainstorming keyword ideas.

If you have a website already, place a search engine on your site. This would be a search engine that you put on your site that searches only your site such as http://www.freefind.com/ . This will help you collect data on what keywords users are using. Once you've collected a good list of search terms you can use this to help you determine the best keywords.

Along this same line, you can also use your website server logs to gather information on the keywords used to find your site.
 
Once you've made a list of the best keywords and keyword phrases, you will need to determine which ones are the best. Your challenge is to find keywords that have a high usage count but appear on the least amount of competing web pages.

Wordtracker.com is an excellent tool for helping you achieve this. Wordtracker's 'Keyword Effectiveness Index' (KEI) will provide you with the number of times a keyword is used along with the number of competing web pages. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition. This means a better chance for you in getting to the top of the search engines.

Finding the best keywords and keyword phrases is an important part of your marketing mix. Find the correct keywords and build your content around them.

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