What can you do if your keywords are too common Is there anything that can help you optimise your keywords to gain more traffic to your website
To start with try including misspellings in your meta tag keywords as this can help you to get visitors who dont know how to spell or those, like me, who type too fast. This type of traffic is just as good as any other. How many people do you know that use a dictionary when they dont know how to spell a word I know I dont and I certainly cant think of many people I know who would do. Whilst including misspellings will help you to some extent, it probably will not provide you with a massive increase in traffic especially now that many search engines have built in spell checkers so that if a user spells a word incorrectly they are presented with the probable correct spelling. If you want to try this then you can take advantage of tools like WordTracker to find out which misspellings are the most popular, and target those.
You should try to think on the same level as your visitors and not always like a webmaster. Thinking like the average person will make you more successful. You really should constantly remind yourself to think like the average person when youre trying to pick the words or phrases which people will use to find you. If you can get into the mind set of a lay person and think What would I type into the search box if I was looking for the content on this web page You will then probably come up with the keywords that are most important. Think of each group within your niche or audience and try to come up with realistic search queries. Entering each word from these queries into your meta tags should help you substantially in terms of increasing your search engine traffic.
If the niche you operate in has a trade language then one of the things that will set you apart from the rest of the world is learning the special language of your niche. When you learn about your chosen niche, you start using acronyms and other words that would be foreign to most people, but mean something to the people who would be searching for you. Words that people outside your niche would search for are not the same as those that people inside it would search for. By targeting these jargon words you will be helping yourself to get much more highly-targeted traffic and with the added advantage of potentially little competition.
Another thing that will set you apart is using words that someone unfamiliar with your niche would use in an attempt to find content regarding niche trade. You should not aim to target your site only at those who already know a good deal about the subject matter that you offer. Your content probably wont be fresh to people who are experienced in your field so you are much more dependent on your products at that point. If, however, you are able to target people who know little or nothing about your particular niche, you will be able to generate a good deal of traffic and probably sell more of your product.
XA final, but very important, method of providing good key word is to discuss the subject of your site with others and observe their reactions to your language. If they seem to suddenly understand what you are saying, that phrase may be a good one for your key words. Talk to your friends, your family, and other web masters about your subject and see what language is generally associated with your subject. This language is generally the correct language to use when generating your key words.
The most important thing to bear in mind when attempting to come up with unique key words is that there are huge groups of people out there who are interested in your niche who have not been targeted by other sites. These niche markets are potentially ripe for the picking. If you can come up with a group that would be interested in what you have to offer but has not been targeted thoroughly by your competition, you will be able to drastically increase your traffic and/or sales. The ability to identify and target niche markets is an art form. However it is one that can be developed by any truly dedicated marketer, but you have to be observant and patient in order to come up with valuable niche markets. After all dont forget , you are attempting to do what nobody has done before!
When you start to optimise your website keywords you will find yourself trying to come up with ever more interesting or unique key words, and you will be trying to implement them more smoothly into your web page. As I have found the reality is that this takes both time and practice. You need to get yourself thoroughly engrossed in the community surrounding your niche market. Check out some forums relating to your market, look at the common forms of media coverage such as magazines and books. There are possible key words everywhere just waiting to be exploited for the sake of increases in your traffic and sales.
Paul Duxbury is a UK based successful online entrepreneur. Invaluable advice on creating successful websites can be found at
Just been giving some simple advice to a friend of mine that is about to embark with an online shop regarding what to do when you purchase a domain...ie. wait until site is complete or launch straight away
This advice was mainly geared towards the Google search engine as this is notoriously the hardest, in time terms, to get into. Although it is also valid for any other search engine that you can mention.
The two simple steps are :
Firstly, upload several pages of keyword rich and subject relevent content to your domain. Now there are two ways of doing this, either it is written by you or you pay someone to write something for you. Ensure however that it is readable and informative content and thus promotes a quality image for your site.
The design of these pages is not majorly important, at this stage, because they are aimed purely at the search engines and not human readers. When you are at go live time they can be reformatted to fall into the same format as the rest of your site. A key factor here is to write one more page of content than you actually plan to upload because this is the way that you will get the search engines to your site.
Now the second step :
Do not bother submitting to the search engines directly, instead take this extra page of content and upload it to one of the higher PageRank rated article directories.
When this article is accepted, which it will be if you followed the quality content instruction, this article then gets published onto the internet and other publishers are given the opportunity to display it on their websites also. Now the benefits are two fold here, firstly the search engines will follow the links displayed and get to your site and spider your pages and you will also be building backlinks for your site before it is even completed.
The reason I gave this advice, relating to Google, was that Google operates a filter which is commonly referred to as the sandbox. This sandbox has been developed so that Google can ensure that your site is not using any spamming methods so that your site climbs the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) quickly. Remember Google is aimed at developing a quality search engine, hence the reason for quality content.
Now concentrate on developing the rest of the site and work happily knowing that you have created content that will help you to start to build backlinks and also advertised your site to the search engines with a view to starting to climb the SERPs. Basically you are putting your site one step ahead of the rest of the sites that are coming online on a daily basis.
Mike - Webmaster and eBay Power Seller at
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