Identify Keywords
Identify Keywords that are Most Likely Used By Potential Customers
Determining what keywords you will target is probably the most important thing
you will do in the search engine optimization process outside of developing your
content. Keywords are the words or phrases that people enter in the search engine
query box. First thing you need to determine is what keywords or phrases people
are most likely to use when searching for the goods, services, or information
your web site offers.
Put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. What words or phrases
would they enter into a search engine in order to find a web site with the goods
and services you have to offer? A good place to start would be to write down a
one paragraph statement that describes the goods, services or information that
your organization offers. Write another one paragraph statement that describes
what people are looking for when they normally approach your organization. This
exercise will help you discern the difference between keywords that summarize
your content and keywords that people are most likely to use to find your content.
Our goal is to optimize your content for high search engine rankings for what
people are likely to search on.
Use the second one paragraph statement you wrote to help you brainstorm a list
from ten to a hundred words or phrases that people are likely to search on. It
may also be helpful to conduct a survey of 10 to 50 potential users. You can use
the first one paragraph statement you wrote to help you formulate the survey questions.
Here is an example. Suppose you want to create a web site that matches people
who want are looking to adopt a pet with people and organizations that are trying
to find homes for unwanted pets. So your one paragraph statement could read:
“ We are a non-profit on-line free pet adoption service. We provide a free
nationwide service of bringing together people who want to adopt pets with people
and organizations that have homeless and unwanted pets.”
From this statement you can extract survey questions like: “How would you find
a free on-line pet adoption service using a search engine or web directory?”
After you have identified the list of potential keywords, go to one or two
of the search engines that you plan on targeting and do a search with each of
these words. This is a quick way of identifying those keywords and phrases that
will yield search engine results with web sites similar to your own. Eliminate
those keywords that yield web sites not even close to your own.
Target Keywords that Maximize Your Likely Hood of Success
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could identify the keywords most likely to be searched
on but have the least number of competing web sites? Fortunately, there are tools
that will help you do this. The best one we found is called Word Tracker. Enter
a keyword or phase, and Word Tracker will show you how many people searched on
that word or phrase that day for each of the major search engines. Word Tracker
will also show you how many listings they had for that keyword or phase. Word
Tracker is available by weekly, monthly or annual subscription. An on-line demo
is also available that has limited features but is still very useful.
Hone in on a Small Final List of Keywords
After using the techniques described above, you should now have honed in on
a small list of keywords. Depending on the size of your site, this should range
anywhere from two to twenty words. These will be the words you will use to for
search engine optimization of your web site.
Tweaking Your Content
Once you have written your content and chosen your keywords, you should tweak
your content in order to optimize your page for the search engines. Here are some
things to keep in mind.
1. Many search engines rank the first
150 to 200 words of your site as the most important. This means that you should
make an effort to make sure that this area of you web page in fairly dense in
your chosen keywords. Be careful not to over do it. Some of the search engines
will penalize you for over use of the same keywords. It seems to be a general
consensus among experts in this field that you should not have a keyword density
between 2% and 7% overall in your page.
2. Make generous use of HTML heading tags.
Heading tags add a recognizable structure to your web site that make it easier
for the search engines to index. Many web site designers avoid heading tags because
they can look ugly. One way to avoid this is to use an external cascading style
sheet that redefines how the heading tags will look. Headings are hierarchical.
For example, an <h1></h1> heading tag generally denotes the overall
heading of the page. An <h2></h2> heading tag denotes the highest-level
section heading. An <h3></h3> heading tag denotes the first sub-topic
under the <h2> heading and so on. Here is an example of a typical structure
as viewed in HTML format:
<body>
<h1> Title of Your Page </h1>
<p> Some introductory text that is chock full of keywords </p>
<h2> First Section Heading </h2>
<p> Some text under this section. </p>
<h3> Sub Heading Under the First Section Heading </h3>
<p> Some text under this sub-heading. </p>
<h3> Anther Sub Heading Under the First Section Heading </h3>
<p> Some text under this sub-heading. </p>
<h2> Second Section Heading </h2>
<p> Some text under this section. </p>
</body>
If you are not familiar with HTML markup, the <p> ... </p> tag set
means paragraph. The content contained with the <h1> </h1> tags should
generally be the title of your page. Make sure that this title contains your most
important keywords.
3. Use an analysis tool that helps you optimize
your content. There are several good search engine optimization tools on the market
that will give you specific advice on how to improve your pages for each search
engine. Celestial Graphics Web Site Design Services uses several of these tools.
Here is a list of tools you can consider.
Web Position Gold by First Place Software: Web Position Gold comes in several
versions including the one that we use, Web Position Gold Pro. You purchase Web
Position Gold as boxed software and then pay for annual or quarterly updates.
One warning: in order for Web Position Gold to stay useful, you will need to subscribe
to the updates. They do not make this clear on their web site.
Bruce Clay’s SEO Tool Set: Bruce Clay provides an suite of tools that is
available on-line through an annual subscription fee.
Keyword Counter: A free on-line tool that counts the density of all keywords
in any web page you choose according to criteria that you specify.
Keyword Density Analyzer: A free on-line tool that allows you to compare
the keyword density of two web pages.
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