Search engines are the vehicles that drive potentialcustomers to your websites. But in order for visitors toreach their destination - your website - you need toprovide them with specific and effective signs that willdirect them right to your site. You do this by creatingcarefully chosen keywords.
Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of theInternet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, andpresto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your frontdoor. But if your keywords are too general or tooover-used, the possibility of visitors actually making itall the way to your site - or of seeing any real profitsfrom the visitors that do arrive - decreases dramatically.
Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketingstrategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, nomatter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, theright people may never get the chance to find out about it.So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gatherand evaluate keywords and phrases.
You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right wordsfor your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haventfollowed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG.Its hard to be objective when you are right in the centerof your business network, which is the reason that you maynot be able to choose the most efficient keywords from theinside. You need to be able to think like your customers.And since you are a business owner and not the consumer,your best bet is to go directly to the source.
Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list ofpotential search words and phrases yourself, ask for wordsfrom as many potential customers as you can. You will mostlikely find out that your understanding of your businessand your customers understanding is significantlydifferent.
The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find thewords you accumulate from them are words and phrases youprobably never would have considered from deep inside thetrenches of your business.
Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases fromoutside resources should you add your own keyword to thelist. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready forthe next step: evaluation.
The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to asmall number of words and phrases that will direct thehighest number of quality visitors to your website. Byquality visitors I mean those consumers who are mostlikely to make a purchase rather than just cruise aroundyour site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluatingthe effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements:popularity, specificity, and motivation.
Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is anobjective quality. The more popular your keyword is, themore likely the chances are that it will be typed into asearch engine which will then bring up your URL.
You can now purchase software that will rate the popularityof keywords and phrases by giving words a number ratingbased on real search engine activity. Software such asWordTracker will even suggest variations of your words andphrases. The higher the number this software assigns to agiven keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect tobe directed to your site. The only fallacy with thisconcept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater thesearch engine position you will need to obtain. If you aredown at the bottom of the search results, the consumer willprobably never scroll down to find you.
Popularity isnt enough to declare a keyword a good choice.You must move on to the next criteria, which isspecificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greaterthe likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchaseyour goods or services will find you.
Lets look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you haveobtained popularity rankings for the keyword automobilecompanies. However, you company specializes in bodyworkonly. The keyword automobile body shops would rank loweron the popularity scale than automobile companies, but itwould nevertheless serve you much better. Instead ofgetting a slew of people interested in everything frombuying a car to changing their oil filters, you will getonly those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpledfenders being directed to your site. In other words,consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who willimmediately find you. Not only that, but the greater thespecificity of your keyword is, the less competition youwill face.
The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, thisrequires putting yourself inside the mind of the customerrather than the seller to figure out what motivationprompts a person looking for a service or product to typein a particular word or phrase. Lets look at anotherexample, such as a consumer who is searching for a job asan IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose betweenSeattle job listings and Seattle IT recruiters which doyou think will benefit the consumer more If you werelooking for this type of specific job, which keyword wouldyou type in The second one, of course! Using the secondkeyword targets people who have decided on their career,have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist youas their recruiter, rather than someone just out of schoolwho is casually trying to figure out what to do with his orher life in between beer parties. You want to find peoplewho are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requiressubtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the mostspecific and directly targeted phrases to bring the mostmotivated traffic to you site.
Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done.You must continually evaluate performance across a varietyof search engines, bearing in mind that times and trendschange, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your logtraffic analysis alone because it will not tell you howmany of your visitors actually made a purchase.
Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help youjudge the effectiveness of your keywords in individualsearch engines. There is now software available thatanalyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic.This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing youthe most valuable customers.
This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make agood keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to findkeywords that direct consumers to your site who actuallybuy your product, fill out your forms, or download yourproduct. This is the most important factor in evaluatingthe efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be thesword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffectiveor inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in betterprofits.
Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula forsearch engine success. This may sound like a lot of work -and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put intoyour keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate yourbusiness rewards.
Zaak OConan discovers and presents informationon to enhance your site, newsletter, marketing and otherInternet related topics. Youll find his other articles that expand your horizons at
Your websites ranking on search engines is a vital elementof your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways toimprove your link popularity through legitimate methods.Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands ofdishonest webmasters seeking to improve their linkpopularity by faking out search engines.
The good news is that search engines have figured this out,and are now on guard for spam pages and sites that haveincreased their rankings by artificial methods. When asearch engines tracks down such a site, that site isdemoted in ranking or completely removed from the searchengines index.
The bad news is that some high quality, completelyabove-board sites are being mistaken for these web pagecriminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up inthe spam net and tossed from a search engines index,even though you have done nothing to deserve such harshtreatment. But there are things you can do - and things youshould be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind ofmisperception.
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites youare linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigningwebsite ranking, and virtually all search engines on theInternet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go aboutincreasing your link popularity, but at the same time, youmust be scrupulously careful about which sites you chooseto link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sitesthat have linked to other sites solely for the purpose ofartificially boosting their link popularity. They haveactually labeled these links bad neighborhoods.
You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot bepenalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site;penalty happens only when you are the one sending out thelink to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, anddouble-check, all the links that are active on your linkspage to make sure you havent linked to a bad neighborhood.
The first thing to check out is whether or not the pagesyou have linked to have been penalized. The most direct wayto do this is to download the Google toolbar athttp://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that mostpages are given a Pagerank which is represented by asliding green scale on the Google toolbar.
Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on thescale. This is especially important when the scale iscompletely gray. It is more than likely that these pageshave been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, youmay catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may bedifficult to recover from the infection.
There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whosescale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale.These sites have not been penalized, and their links maygrow in value and popularity. However, do make sure thatyou closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain thatat some point they do not sustain a penalty once you havelinked up to them from your links page.
Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use toartificially boost their link popularity is the use ofhidden text. Search engines usually use the words on webpages as a factor in forming their rankings, which meansthat if the text on your page contains your keywords, youhave more of an opportunity to increase your search engineranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive ofkeywords.
Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hidingtheir keywords in such a way so that they are invisible toany visitors to their site. For example, they have used thekeywords but made them the same color as the backgroundcolor of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords ona white background. You cannot see these words with thehuman eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spotthem easily! A spider is the program search engines use toindex web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, itgoes back and boosts that pages link ranking.
Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, butsearch engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as asearch engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! thepage is penalized.
The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bitoverzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. Forexample, if the background color of your page is gray, andyou have placed gray text inside a black box, the spiderwill only take note of the gray text and assume you areemploying hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty,simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same colorto text as the background color of the page - ever!
Another potential problem that can result in a penalty iscalled keyword stuffing. It is important to have yourkeywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes youcan go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to pleasethose spiders. A search engine uses what is calledKeyphrase Density to determine if a site is trying toartificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio ofkeywords to the rest of the words on the page. Searchengines assign a limit to the number of times you can use akeyword before it decides you have overdone it andpenalizes your site.
This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpasswithout sounding as if you are stuttering - unless yourkeyword is part of your company name. If this is the case,it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keywordis renters insurance, be sure you dont use this phrasein every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site sothat the copy flows naturally and the keyword is notrepeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keywordshould never appear in more than half the sentences on thepage.
The final potential risk factor is known as cloaking. Tothose of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept shouldbe easy to understand. For the rest of youcloaking is whenthe server directs a visitor to one page and a searchengine spider to a different page. The page the spider seesis cloaked because it is invisible to regular traffic,and deliberately set-up to raise the sites search engineranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everythingit needs to rocket that pages ranking to the top of thelist.
It is natural that search engines have responded to thisact of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steeppenalties on these sites. The problem on your end is thatsometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such asprevention against the theft of code, often referred to aspagejacking. This kind of shielding is unnecessary thesedays due to the use of off page elements, such as linkpopularity, that cannot be stolen.
To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster isaware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make surethe webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind willput your website at great risk.
Just as you must be diligent in increasing your linkpopularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligentto avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitoryour site closely and avoid any appearance of artificiallyboosting your rankings.
Zaak OConan discovers and presents informationon to enhance your site, newsletter, marketing and otherInternet related topics. Youll find his other articles that expand your horizons at