 Quite simply, keywords are the most important aspect of your site.Published Date: 2002-11-27 04:42:35 WorkOnInternet.com
The single most important aspect of search engine promotion and optimization is to choose the most important keywords for your site and design your pages around those keywords. If your page is about "widgets" and you have a #1 ranking for "chairs", that's not going to do you any good. Choosing the wrong keywords for your site will virtually doom your chances for success! The very first step in any search engine promotion campaign is to sit down and create a list of keywords related to your product or service. Once you have your list of keywords, you can then begin to design your pages around those keywords. I'll teach you exactly how to decide what are your most important keywords, and show you how to find keywords you may never have considered! First and foremost is the most important task at hand. That is, a targeted user needs to be identified. Does the site you are about to optimize exist so that it can generate online sales? Generate more sales leads? Provide information to a specific online community? The answers to these questions will all lie within the content that is (or will become) readily available to all web site users. Once you know who the site is intended to target, begin to search various engines using that particular mind set. Searching for services? Yahoo! seems the most logical and immediately available, so start there. Looking to provide information to a specific online community? Google comes to mind since it offers such an extensive amount of content readily available… My point here is that it is important to think as the targeted user does, and search from where they would most likely start for what they appear to search for. Targeted traffic will be generated by any page ranking well for keywords that are searched for regularly. But how can one find out which keywords and phrases are searched for most often? Thankfully for us SEOs, there are services and subscriptions available from proprietary databases that allow you to access search history from web users. (An excellent example is WordTracker.com) While each of these databases are able to provide you with some concrete numbers, illustrating the most effective of keyword choices, the rank an optimized page can obtain on the results pages will always become the most powerful factor in delivering this traffic. While the information within database systems allows one to locate the terms most suitable for optimization - some discretion should still be used. If you are optimizing a web site for a client who sells used cars in and around the city of Boston - do not let them tell you they should be ranked number 1 for the term "car". It simply cannot happen, and should not happen - for a number of reasons. You will need to go back now to what you found when you identified your targeted site user. It is not someone looking to buy new cars in New York, right? Of course it isn't! But, someone from New York, looking to buy a new car may very well just type in "car". If so, they are probably still searching for things. As users of search engines become more experienced with the Internet in general, they begin to understand that the more information they give TO a search engine, the more appropriate the results given back become. So, it would then become logical to target "used cars boston" as one of your key words. Bear in mind here, your job is not to simply deliver traffic to a web site. It is to deliver targeted traffic to a web site. There's nothing targeted about someone who lives 3000 miles away and is not interested in buying your clients used products. It is also very possible to over specify your target market too. Try to keep all keyword phrases to 2 or 3 words in length - as longer keywords are very rarely searched for. To use our existing example - ask yourself: Will targeting "used Honda dealer south boston" provide you with many users? Again... Of course not! Researching keyword variations within these databases also provides some great results. Once you can determine the most searched for and appropriate keywords, you can begin to apply them within the process of optimization. If a web site can be found quickly and easily for the terms that it targets, then the web site can work for its owner by stimulating more business. While attracting targeted traffic may seem easy enough, there are some surprises to be found in just about any campaign. Another good idea is to visit your competition and look at the terms they use in the keywords tag and throughout their pages. Spend a good bit of time on this, because it will pay-off big down the road. Now lets talk about keyword density. Keyword density, which is expressed as a percentage, is figured by dividing the total number of occurences of a particular keyword by the total number of words on the page. This is something you can have direct control over by placing important keywords and keyword phrases both in the content of your page and in your META tags. Search engines use this keyword density (as well as numerous other factors) to help them determine the relevance of a site. However, they can also use it to filter out spamming. For example, try talking coherently for a minute about "web design", but make sure that the phrase "web design" occurs once for every four words you say (a 50% keyword density). You might end up with a monologue like, "Web design is exciting. Web design is fun. I love web design," which would hardly classify as compelling content. So what is optimal keyword density? Believe it or not, but most agree on about 2-7%. I've done some analysis on Google and generally found that 3-4% is about normal for the main keyword phrase. This is why keeping your titles, descriptions, and keywords brief and well-focused is so important. Using excessive keywords and long descriptions to include words that aren't directly related to the page actually ends up diluting your keyword density for your page's main topic. This ends up hurting you much more than it helps! Consider 100 words of page content about "hair dryers". Assuming that the phrase "hair dryer" occurs 4 times, that's a keyword saturation of 4% for each word. Now add a META keyword tag that's 100 words long and includes the phrase "hair dryers" 3 times (generally the accepted safe maximum). Now the phrase "hair dryers" occurs 7 times in 200 words - a keyword density of only 3.5%. However, if the keyword tag had simply consisted of the phrase "hair dryers", the keyword density would have increased to 4.9%. Again, I encourage you to take the time to visit some of the major engines and analyze your competitor's sites for keyword density. An excellent online free program that will help you do keyword density analysis is available from http://www.keyworddensity.com/ . Then experiment with different pages of your site to see which densities get you the best results. In conclusion, if the optimized web site can obtain high ranks for those keywords, then the optimization campaign is becoming a success. Choosing those keywords and phrases though requires some work - both from the optimizer and site owner. Impress your clients and have some things readily available… Optimization professionals should always be aware of the work and research required in order to make web sites rank well! It is after all, their business.
Home | Submit Article| Article Topics | Article Archives | Newsletter | Business Directory | Contact US |
