In early 2006 there are almost 1 billion Internet users on planet earth producing close to the same number of daily searches. (Please handle the amount of daily searches with care, there are quite differing numbers around, but whatever the actual number is, it is huge!)
As e-marketers we want to understand what people are looking for when they search the Internet. Keyword research can help anticipate trends. Google Zeitgeist is an entertaining source for aggregated information on Internet searches and all the major search engines release similar data. Keyword search data produces surprises as well as realization as the Internet reveals undisguised preferences as surfers feel unobserved.
Exploring keywords people are searching for we can understand whether we actually have a market and if we do have a market, how difficult it will be to exploit it. The relation between the amounts of searches for certain keywords and the competing pages for this keyword in the indices of major search engines reveals how effective it will be to use these keywords on a website.
It is important that strategic keywords consist of at least two words so visitors to your website coming from the search engines will be targeted. The more words in keyword phrase, the easier it will be to be on the top of the list. Generally speaking, the process of finding the right keywords will be to first find the most general terms representing the web sites business, then break these general terms into more specific ones. Each page of your web site has then to be optimized for the most specific term characterizing this page. Whenever possible, favor product names over other available keywords.
The amount of keywords in your keyword basket determines how many web pages your website must at least have. It is a good idea to have not more than 5 major keywords for each page. When launching a new web site it makes sense to be as specific as possible in the keyword selection, later on more generic and hence more competitive keywords can be selected.
These are the general principles of keyword research and they do work. However, they do not guarantee the success of a web site business. Here are some additional factors:
1. Consider the quality of web sites in a certain industry. There are certain industries that have an overall poor quality of web sites. Quality here refers to all on-site factors (technology, coding standards, content). In those industries it will be easy to be on the top of the list and make money if you can come up with a working revenue model.
2. English is the dominant language on the Internet. Keyword research can and should be conducted in multiple languages to maximize exposure.
3. The general e-readiness of an industry or business area. Business models on the Internet are manifold. In some areas simple lead generation might be the most effective and profitable way to go. Some business areas might just not work.
4. The aim of keyword-rich content is to rank high in major search engines. However, search engines only will be able to see these keywords if our website is fully crawlable, e.g. if we use search engine friendly technologies.
5. If a website ranks high in major search engines for relevant keywords, it will draw substantial traffic. Traffic on the Internet is money, but this only holds true, if potential customers are actually converted into paying customers, if traffic is converted into clicks on advertisement and so forth. This opens up the discussion to whole other areas like web site stickiness and usability. A web site has to convert or otherwise it will not be successful.
In a nutshell, keyword research undoubtedly is a very important and also fascinating field of Internet marketing that unravels the magnitude of the Internet. But it is one of various key ingredients. Keyword research can be used as a feasibility study and forecast technique for a new web site venture and boost traffic potential for an existing on, but it is not the only factor enhancing a web sites visibility on the Internet. If also other indispensable on-site and off-site factors are in place, visibility will result in traffic. However, traffic will only result in money if a website has a good conversion rate.
Svend Nelson is a university lecturer and Internet entrepreneur. He is an online marketing specialist active in various online industries; among his online presences in the real estate and home loan industry are and home loans. Svend also just started a blog sharing his experience about how to make money online. Svend lived and worked in various countries across Latin America, Europe and Asia before settling in Thailand.
In parts one and two of this five part tutorial, I discussed how to select and analyze the keywords that you should try and rank your page for. In this article Ill discuss how to format your page in such a way that the search engines know it is relevant to your chosen keywords. This process is known as on-page optimization.
Step 3: On-Page Optimization
There are two kinds of search engine optimization: on-page and off-page. On-page optimization is the stuff you do to your actual web page that will help it get ranked. Off-page optimization means stuff that isnt on the page that affects your ranking (namely, in-bound links). Both are important. For Yahoo and MSN, on-page is more important than it is for Google. Google relies more heavily on links than the other big two, though Yahoo and MSN also weight links heavily.
In this case, I wanted to optimize the home page of the feline photos blog for the phrase cat pictures. This is how I normally do this:
1. Make sure the domain name contains the keywords.
2. Make the title of the page my exact keywords I am targeting, capitalized appropriately.
3. Make the very first text on the page the keywords in an H1 (header) tag.
4. Put an introductory paragraph that uses the keywords right after the H1 tag.
5. If I have a lot of text on the page, break it up with H2 tags that contain variations of my keywords.
Unfortunately, catpictures.blogspot.com was not available, so I couldnt do #1. Since competition for cat pictures was somewhat light, I knew that I could get by without worrying about it. But if you are targeting more competitive keywords, make sure that your domain name (or subdomain name) contains the exact phrase you want to rank for. This especially helps for MSN.
Also, I didnt do number five for my feline photos blog, because being a picture gallery there wasnt that much text on the page. But Ill give you more detail on how that works in case your page does have a lot of text.
Lets say that I have an article on pontoon boats that I want to rank for the phrase pontoon boats. This is what I would do for the on-page optimization: Try and get a domain name with the words pontoon boats in it (www.pontoonboats.com would be perfect). If there isnt anything available, then setup a subdomain for it (pontoonboats.mydomain.com).
Make the page title Pontoon Boats, put the H1 tag at the beginning of the text as Pontoon Boats, then break up the article with H2 subheadings like Maintaining Pontoon Boats, Pontoon Boats for Fishing, Are Pontoon Boats Fast, etc. You dont want your subheadings to be exactly your keywords like the main H1 heading and the title, but you want the subheadings to contain your keywords.
Thats really all I do with on-page optimization, and as I said before, if the competition is light I dont always do all five of those things.
There are other things that search engine marketers focus on and spend a lot of time with (things like keyword density and image alt tag density, etc.), but since I dont try to rank for fiercely competitive keywords I dont usually bother with all of that. I leave the ranking of really tough keywords to the serious SEO gurus, because to me its just too much dang work.
To me, ranking for really competitive keywords is like owning a boat: it requires far too much time, money and effort to maintain to be worth the end result (going to the lake three times a yearsorry boat owners!).
No thanks. Ill rank for moderately competitive keywords and only have to do a little bit of maintenance every now and again, and by multiplying that effort Ill earn 10 times the advertising revenue that I would if I focused on one tough set of keywords.
Whats Next
Once youve got your page properly optimized for your chosen keywords, its time to get to the hard part: getting in-bound links to your site. I quote hard because its not really difficult, just tedious. However, in the last part of this tutorial I will show you a tool that makes all of the work of gathering in-bound links much, much easier.
Jonathan Leger is the creator of the first commercial AdSense Tracker script packages available, which has grown into the widely-popular product set,
The full 5 part SEO tutorial is also available in an ebook which you can download from: