Researching & choosing keywords

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Search engines and directories, like Goggle and Yahoo, are usually the most effective and least expensive methods for bringing traffic to your website. They like keywords, links, traffic, and money. Give them what they want and they will bring lots of traffic to your website.

Search engines use keywords to index billion of web pages and to rank them against each other. If you choose and use your keywords wisely, you will rank high with the search engines and happily walk to the bank. If not, your website will end up buried among thousand of others and nobody will ever find it.

Keyword selection is the single most important thing to do to increase your website traffic and should be a critical step of your website marketing strategy. Be very concerned about the results if you are not deeply involved with this process.

Definitions

Search engines such as Google help users find web pages on the Internet. They use keywords to rank websites.

A keyword is a word or phrase that describes the main concepts of a topic. For example, if your website topic is capital punishment, keywords might include capital punishment, death penalty, death sentence, execution, etc..

Preliminary list of keywords

Now, the idea here is to make a list of potential keywords for your website. To save time with this process, use a spreadsheet and list all your keywords on the left column.

1. Make a list of keywords that your potential customers will likely use to find your website. If you sell dog food, good keywords could be �dog food�, �healthy dog food�, �pet food�, �pet nutrition�, etc.

2. Visit your competitors' websites and see what keywords they use (With Explorer, �view�, �source�, and look at meta name keywords. With Netscape, �view�, �page source�, and look at meta name keywords).

3. Think about your customers needs instead of focusing strictly on the products or services you are trying to sell. If you are a chiropractor, "sports injuries" or �marathon training� might be good keywords.

4. Ask your friends, family, partners, customers, etc. what keywords they would use to find the products or services you are promoting.

5. Go to Google and enter your keywords one by one. Look at the websites come on top and see what other keywords they use.

6. Use individual keywords to build keyphrases like �ice fishing equipment�. Try to limit your keyphrases to 3 words in length.

7. Take advantage of common misspelling. If any of your keywords is routinely misspelled, include the incorrect version in your keyword list in the hope to attract bad spellers to your website. An example is "web sight" instead of "web site".

8. Take advantage of your competitor�s fame. If you sell diapers, "Huggies" might be a good keyword. Even if you do not sell this specific brand, it will drive a lot of people looking to buy diapers to your website.

9. Run your list of keywords through a keywords suggestion tool such as the ones at Overture, Google Adwords and Submit Express and see what keywords or keyword phrases you might have overlooked.

Final list of keywords

Not all keywords are equal. The idea is now to determine the quality index of each of your keywords.

1. Add a column to your spreadsheet and for each keyword, assign the relevancy to your business. Use a scale form 0-9, 9 being the highest relevancy. If you sell candies, "hockey tournament" probably deserves a low relevancy.

2. Add a column to your spreadsheet and for each keyword, enter how often it has been used in the past by people surfing the Internet. This information is available from Submit Express or other keywords analysis tool.

3. Add a column to your spreadsheet and for each keyword, enter how many web page you are competing against. This information is available from the Google search results.

4. Add a column to your spreadsheet and compute the quality index for each of your keywords. Simply multiply the relevancy by the frequency and divide by the number of competing pages. Normalize the results by multiplying or dividing by a constant so you do not end up with very large or very small numbers.

5. Sort your keywords by quality index. The keywords with the highest quality index are the ones you want to focus on. To remain search engines friendly and avoid being penalized, you will need to limit your list to no more than 20 keywords and 500 characters.

6. Examine your list and look for keywords that bring little added value and prevent you to include important keywords to your list of the top 20.

6a. Look for imbedded keywords. �Vegetarian dog food� also contains �dog food�, eliminating the need to use �dog food� as a separate keyword.

6b. Look at words where the plural form also contains the singular form? �Hotels" also contains "hotel", eliminating the need to use �hotel� as a separate keyword.

Do it again

The Internet is a very dynamic place, with thousands of web pages being added or modified every hour. Do not expect that your first time selecting your keywords will be the last. You should probably re-tune your keywords every 6-12 months.

Search Engines Optimization (SEO)

Now that you are done choosing and selecting your keywords, it is time to use them. See our Search Engines Optimization (SEO) page for more details.