Selecting The Optimal Keywords To Steer Traffic To Your Site

by internet business blogger on October 30, 2009

Internet business

If you are like your neighbor who owns a web site, you want your site to appear in the top ten of Google search results. Unfortunately, only very few people have the knowledge to actually accomplish it. There are many steps to take in order to be found for keywords associated with your website. Moreover, taking your time to investigate the best possible phrases for your web site is a significant rung on the ladder.

Many webmasters make the slip-up of assuming that a ranking for one generic term associated with their site will turn their site into a money-making success. Ranking well for one generic term can provide a fine flow of traffic and brand appreciation, this does not imply the visitors to your site will be targeted traffic that will convert into sales or become opt in subscribers. And the costs of targeting that term will likely exceed your long term profits. It is best for you to target multiple terms associated with the benefits of your product or the problems your product solves. Such terms will not only drive traffic, but also lead to a significant amount of conversion.

Your first goal is to consider who your prospects are and the reasons why they will visit your web site. Do you advertise products online? Do you suggest services? Is your website more information focused? Who would benefit and why would they benefit from your website? Once you understand your potential visitors and why they will visit you will be able to use your time more wisely in selecting keywords.

With that as a goal, you can now think about the benefit or problem specific keywords that you believe people will use in searches to find your website. You ought not to be satisfied with just a single keyword. This is a snare that lots of webmasters fall into when they sense that one term will produce sufficient visitors to support their business. And they are amazed that their business does not improve if they do attain that ranking. Consider all of the potential keywords and themes of your website, even reference a thesaurus to find associated terms. You can also investigate rival websites for ideas. It can be amazing just what words and phrases your prospective visitors will be using!

After having developed a list of specific terms, you can start using tools to determine how popular and competitive those keywords are. Also, you’ll start to sharpen up those keywords to be more targeted to your website’s purpose.

To start out you’ll find out how widely used your keywords are. This task can be performed using numerous keyword suggestion tools.

Keyword suggestion tools tell you which terms were typed into searches, and how many searches were performed using those terms. Entering a phrase in the tool will result in a variety of alternative phrases that contain your term, alternative suggestions with a similar theme and also an estimate of the magnitude of traffic each expression produces per month. These resources can be inconsistent as they query different search engines and the traffic estimations can be inaccurate, but they are still helpful for trying to get a ball park estimate of the amount of searches performed, and for suggesting multiple keywords you may never have considered targeting.

Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, located at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is free to use and gives you a list of suggested words and phrases as well as the amount of searches performed on Google.

A similar tool is located at http://www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the metacrawlers Dogpile and Metacrawler. So the figures might not be representative of what’s being searched on the web as a whole. But Wordtracker is still good for offering alternative keywords and associated phrases. Wordtracker has a subscription service. Wordtracker offers monthly or annual subscriptions.

Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com is a comparative newcomer to the keyword suggestion market. KeywordDiscovery can query over 200 search engines world wide and produces similar results to Wordtracker as well as other tools, but with subscriptions starting at $69.95 per month. You can evaluate this service for free but you’ll receive only a subset of the results you would receive as a paid member.

The next step in picking the best terms is checking how competitive they are. What you;re hoping to find here are terms that have high volume traffic but not many websites contending to rank for that term. You can use various techniques to determine this. Competitive pages that are optimized for a term will surely have that term in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site. So by going to Google and entering the queries intitle:“phrase here” and inanchor:“phrase here”, you can establish the number of other pages that have been optimized for your chosen keyword. The smaller the number for these searches, the less competition there is for the term. For more content about what these Google advanced search operators do, go to http://google.about.com/od/googlepowersearches/Google_Power_Searches.htm.

Using these tools should have now provided you with a list of keywords that are significantly more targeted than your initial keywords. These keywords can include breaking your term down by regional position, or a specific product. You should now be able to optimize your website for multiple phrases – remember that search engines index each of your pages and not only websites. The result is that all of the pages in your website can be found in search engines, and this means that all of your pages can be optimized for distinctive terms!

You may also want to consider the “long tail” search phrases. These are very specific multi word phrases that are use infrequently in searches, but are so specific they can end up being the most targeted terms and carry with them higher conversion rates. The best way to target the long tail is to have a content rich site – the more content you have the more opportunities you have to include little used phrases that can be found somewhere on your site.

So you should now finally have a list of the best possible targeted phrases for your site! As you can see, the practice of choosing your terms in not a task that can be considered quickly. There is a lot of work to complete if you seek to maximize the capability of your web site to attract organic search traffic. With your final list you will now be ready to rework your pages to be found for those keywords, but that is an additional subject.

You’ll discover more material about business web page design tips, cheap website traffic and more at the author’s websites. You’ll find revealing articles, stimulating videos, and helpful products.

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