Saturday, November 25, 2006

How To Select Keywords For Search Engine Optimization

Selecting the correct keywords can make or break your website. Potential customers search the web for desired sites, and if your website doesn't have the keywords they're looking for, they'll miss you.

Determining keywords is an art; it's best to work backwards. What would a customer search for if they were looking for your site? You literally have to put yourself in the consumer's place and let go of your preconceived notions about what you think your keywords are. You should remember when writing your site that you need to use words that are not only related to your content, but are popular search words as well. This is called keyword optimization, or choosing the most searched keywords related to your content.

Spend some time listing all of the words and phrases that are related to your website content. Get ideas from everyone you can think of and list them all. Visit competitors' sites and see what meta tags they use. After this research, you are ready to develop your own keyword phrases.

There are several sites designed to assist you in keyword optimization. Here are a few of the free ones:-

The Overture Keyword Tool (http://www.inventory.overture.com ) lists searches related to the keyword you provide. This took is great for expanding your list.

Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) helps identify keywords that will help your ranking on search engines. Wordtracker also gives you other keyword combinations that you may have overlooked.

The Keyword Tumbler (http://www.keywordtumbler.com) takes your existing keyword phrases and mixes it up to form new phrases and variations that you can include in your meta tags.

A great website is not so great if no one finds it. Remember to research your keywords carefully from the consumer's viewpoint and then sit back and watch the traffic roll in!

About the Author:
Evelyn Lim is a publisher of the popular newsletter "Mapping You to Success" aimed at the aspiring home based internet business owner. She also hopes to educate her readers on acquiring multiple sources of online income. Please visit her site at http://www.e-BizMap.com for more information.
Article Source: ArticleWarehouse

2 comments:

CDOToday Admin said...

In selecting keywords for Search Engine Optimization, I suggest to try try the KeywordDiscovery - Keyword Research Tool which has a much larger keyword database. Great for tail end and niche keyword research.

Anonymous said...

I have used KeywordDiscovery too and I found it useful to my Blogging, to target the right keywords that most people are trying to search on the search engines. But I do have a huge number of competitors that are also has a huge number of traffics.

And a beginner or a newbie just like me who just started a blog or a site is a no match with those sites who already established good traffics for a while. So, I read a lot of articles and researched a good tools that can track down easily what are my competitors are doing on their keyword strategy and I bump with this newly launched keyword tool, the KeywordSpy. Using this tool gave me an opportunity to immediately track down my competitors and gather keywords for the promotional campaign of my blog, though I am only using their free trial version.