The wrong keywords bring lookers; the right ones bring willing buyers. Keywords are how search engines index and classify your website. Keywords are at the heart of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Choosing the right keyword phrases for your website is critical to success. The right keywords will bring targeted traffic.
All of your other SEO strategies wont help you at all if you choose the wrong keywords. This is because all these strategies are built on top of the keywords.
So how do you pick the right keywords You have to think like your customer. People search for solutions to what they need. They look for the product or service that satisfies their need. They do this more often than looking for the person who supplies the service.
If a business owner is looking for help with their business, they search for business consulting rather than a business consultant. A person will search for carpet cleaning much more often then carpet cleaners.
If your products or services are local or regional, be sure to include your state or city within your search phrases. People will search for area codes and zip codes when looking for local suppliers.
To create a list for your websites keywords, start with listing out your companys products and services. Use the language that your customers would use. A frequent mistake is to use language from the industry you are in. People who sell booths for exhibitions refer to them as pop up displays. Yet their customers will search for trade show displays four times more often.
Competitors are a great source of intelligence. Go to your competitors websites and look at what terms or keyword phrases they are using. Look at their keywords Meta Tag, and read through their page text. What specific search terms are being used
If you currently have a website, analyze how your visitors are finding you.. Look at your website statistics and see what search terms are generating traffic. Most hosting companies provide you the ability to analyze your websites log files. We recommend using a log file analyzer such as AwStats, Webalizer or Urchin. The new Google Analytics are another great tool.
There are a number of good keyword research tools available to help in selecting the right phrases. An excellent one is Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com). Wordtracker has allows you to search a Thesaurus that will list keywords that you may not have considered. They show daily search volume and the number of competing web pages by search engine. There is a charge for this service, but it is well worth it.
There are several free tools available such as Overture (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion) and Google Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/select/main).
Buyer vs. researcher: Is you website an informational website Then you want to attract researchers. Are you selling a product or service Then you want to attract buyers. Researchers tend to use general keywords and buyers tend to use very specific keywords.
The Buying Cycle has three phases. Lets show how this can work with someone looking for video games:
1.Research: People gather information to learn what is new, latest trends and what is popular. They are looking to learn and gather information. They will tend to use general terms such as Video Games
2.Shop: In this phase they are comparing and narrowing their choices. They are looking at availability, pricing, shipping, etc. Buyers in this stage reveal their preferences, so more specific keywords (for example, Video Games Xbox 360) are needed to cover all possible search terms.
3.Buy: Visitors have now decided on what they want and are now looking to purchase. They usually are looking for a specific product or a model number. The keywords you use to attract buyers at this stage are very specific; for example they may search for: XB360 Call of Duty 2.
Buyers tend to use highly specific phrases as well as singular rather than plural forms. A person looking for new furniture is more likely to type in leather sofa rather than leather sofas
It may be tempting to go after the general high volume keyword, but this usually isnt a good idea. Many times the websites that rank well for the general term are not the ones that actually close the sale. They educate the buyer only to lose the sale to someone else who chose more specific keywords.
More specific keyword phrases almost always have fewer competitors and it is much faster to get top rankings.
Once you choose your keywords, place them strategically and prominently on your web pages. Make sure they are used in a natural way and make good marketing sense. The language you use needs to be action oriented to convince your visitors to buy.
How often should these keywords be looked at We recommend analyzing your website every 6 months. The markets change, traffic patterns shift and what works today, may not work tomorrow.
This article may be reprinted in its entirety for use in newsletters, websites, article archives and newspapers provided that this resource box is left intact and all links are left active.
Copyright December 2005
Doug Williams is the founder and president of Doug Williams and Associates, LLC. DWA ( ) is an Internet marketing and search engine optimization firm. DWA operates a managed linking service Dont Worry About Links at .
Doug Williams is the founder of Doug Williams and Associates (DWA). Doug, a results oriented business consultant, is experienced in designing and implementing strategic plans and business systems. His key strength is the ability to originate and implement change. Doug has expertise in financial, operations and general management in companies experiencing rapid change in both high growth and start-up situations. He has served on the Board of Directors for 2 companies.
Since 2002, Doug Williams has focused on Internet marketing and search engine optimization. Doug has developed a number of specialized web applications and tools for search engine optimization. He specializes in ethical SEO that does not spam the search engines, but rather focuses on building traffic within the search engine guidelines.
Many of you have heard of submitting your website, but what does this really mean What places should you really submit your website What about submitting to thousands of search engines and directories through some website promotion service
WHAT PAGES TO SUBMIT:
At the minimum, you should submit your home page. Many search engines will promise to find and crawl the rest of your website automatically (in their own good time). But if they dont discourage you from doing so, I would submit several of the important pages in your site. For example, a site map is definitely something I would want to submit, since it should have direct links to the rest of your website.
Also, if I get another webmaster to link to my website, it I like to submit that page as well. I want the search engines to recognize that this resource has changed - it has a link to my website and I want the credit for it.
WHAT TO PREPARE:
For the search engines, I would make sure that the website is properly optimized. At a minimum, I would do a double check the meta-tags to ensure that the title, meta-description and meta-keywords properly describe the web pages and have some of my desired keywords in it. I would also run a website validator on the pages I intend on submitting - to keep the search engine spiders from choking on my website. ( ) For more information on optimizing a website for the search engines, go to http://website-optimization-2.blogspot.com/.
For the directories, I would normally prepare some commonly requested information. This really helps to speed up the process. I normally use a generic text editor like Microsoft Notepad and save the following data before I go and submit to the different search engines and directories. This enables me to use copy and paste.
This should have:
* Your email
* Your website url
* A good title for your website
* A description for the website
Since Yahoo will allow you to submit a list of URLS that are in a text document (or an RSS feed) I would encourage you to prepare one to help them out. These should be at the root directory of your website and be updated whenever there is a change to your pages. That way you can just submit the location of the RSS feed or the text file and let Yahoo use that to find the rest of your pages. It is a nice time saver. Personally, I like using an automated RSS feed since Yahoo can use it to determine when the last changes occurred and decide what pages to re-crawl first.
(If you dont know what RSS is, here is a great article on it: .)
Google uses a similar technology to help it find all of your web pages. It is called a Google Site Map. That is the subject of another article. I wrote one that has a lot more info on the Google Site Maps, for when you are ready to build one. Google also has a special way to submit these. Just follow their instructions. If this is too complicated, contact a webmaster or a SEO specialist who is familiar with this feature.
WHERE TO SUBMIT:
I would recommend submitting your home page to the major search engines individually, at least initially. However, there are several services that do groups of them for you - and is a big time saver for the rest of your site. The following is one of my favorites: I have always deselected Google, though, since I submit to them manually through the Google website. I submit my web pages to the following search engines manually (without a special tool) just to ensure that it is done.
*
* Submit to Yahoo
* Submit to MSN
You will need a Yahoo account to submit to the Yahoo search engine. And dont fret if you dont see immediate results. Your site should normally exist in MSN within about 6 weeks, in Yahoo in 8-12 weeks, and in Google within about 3 months. (You will not likely get much search results from Google for the first year though - but hold out and keep working on the other tricks. In the long run, Google will normally give you about 60 - 70% of the search engine traffic if you follow these methods.)
Also, if you have the Alexa toolbar installed, navigate to your website and click on the info button on the toolbar. Then you will have to fill in information about your website. Once this is registered, you will start seeing how your websites Alexa rating looks. There has been some rumors that Google considers the Alexa description in its searches - so make sure it is relevant to your website as a whole and has at least one of your keywords.
You should also . This is a massive directory that is republished in several other websites. It is managed by humans, and is therefore considered to be of special relevance by other search engines. I strongly recommend reading all their rules before submitting - and follow them closely. Make sure that you try to get listed in only one category - the most relevant one for your business. It can take a month or two to get listed, but it really helps with your backlinks and overall relevancy as a website.
After DMOZ, here are the most important list of directories to be listed in.
* ($299 annual fee)
* ($199 annual fee)
* ($49 annual fee)
* ($40 annual fee)
* ($40 lifetime fee)
* ($40 lifetime fee)
* ($40 lifetime fee)
* ($40 lifetime fee)
* ($40 lifetime fee)
* ($25 lifetime fee)
If you havent used directories before - try browsing these before you fill out the form to submit your site. They are organized by category. You need to find the most relevant category to put your website before you start to fill out the form for each of these. Have a pen and paper as you browse - and write down directory paths of where you want to be.
Being in some directories just adds some good backlinks. (When another webmaster links to your website, this is considered a backlink.) Others, like Yahoo and DMOZ, tend to get some special relevance to certain search engines. After you get familiar with these well-known directories, look for niche directories that are specific to the type of business your website is about.
There are specialized directories that focus on a particular category of links. These can be valuable - you will just have to do a bit of searching to find them. These may be considered as part of your overall strategy.
Being listed in a search engine there doesnt guarantee that you will have a good ranking - this is just the first step - letting them know that you exist.
IF YOU SEE AN OFFER TO GET LISTED IN HUNDREDS OF DIRECTORIES AND WEBSITES AUTOMATICALLY - BEWARE! Many of these will list you in hundreds of FFA (free for all) sites. These sites are considered SPAM by search engines and I would strongly encourage you to avoid them. Did I mention to avoid these Check out what Google has to say about these: . They may get you quick backlinks, but they are from the wrong type of site. These are just a list of sites - and they stay there temporarily. Only the latest 100 submitted or so are displayed there and you need to be resubmitted regularly to stay there. Few humans use this - it is just a linking game to trick the search engines about your popularity (and search engines dont like it). Dont bother.
TO WRAP IT UP:
Get backlinks - but avoid FFA sites. There are some important directories, but being listed in THOUSANDS OF WEBSITES AND DIRECTORIES is likely a promotional trick to get you listed in FFA sites. The most important backlinks are from web pages with content related to your website and those that your customers visit. If it isnt likely to draw your customers, it may not be very important for your website traffic.
Robert Fuess is a veteran website designer who specializes in making dynamic search engine optimized websites. |