How To Choose the Right Keywords

The first key to using keywords is to start thinking in terms of keyword phrases instead of just one single word. The reason for this is because there are just too many people out there doing exactly the same thing you are – going to an keyword generator or inventory search tool and coming up with the top single keywords that you are every month. This keeps you neck and neck with your competition but it does not really give you an edge over them.

Your key to success here is finding the appropriate “niche” key words. You also want to use two or three words strung together, also known as “keyphrases.” Studies have shown that most people type in two or three word combinations when they conduct searches, not single words.

Coming up with a list of the most targeted key phrases for your web site involves a bit of brainstorming and utilizing some free online web tools which are discussed in Part III of this book.
One method is to put yourself in the headspace of your site’s visitors, and write down words and phrases that you think they would use when searching for a site such as yours. For instance let’s say that you were searching for a daily horoscope. Rather than using just “horoscope” as a keyword you might try keyword combinations such as –

Daily horoscope
Today’s horoscope
Todays horoscope
Todays daily horoscope
Astrology prediction
Todays astrology
Horoscope today

Notice that the misspellings such as “todays” as opposed to “today’s can be included in these keywords. Don’t be afraid to include misspellings and misspell a main keyword throughout your SEO article.

You can also use ad” Dictionary and/or a Thesaurus to come up with words that are related to your topic. If you don’t have a hard copy, there are really good online versions located at:

www.thesaurus.reference.com
www.dictionary.reference.com

If your imagination fails you, look up your competitors online and see what kind of keywords they are using. It might inspire you to come up with a phrase that tops your competition.
If you’re trying to target a certain geographic location, make sure to include your city and state in your key phrase list. This is especially important right now, as many of the search engines have branched out into offering “local search.”

One of the keys to search engine optimization is determining your keyword density. This refers to the number of searchable keywords and keyword phrases that you have on your web pages. Keywords are vital to achieving a high page ranking and if you hire a professional SEO firm to do it for you, one of the first things they will do is look at your web pages to see if they have a high keyword density. If there aren’t any keywords on your pages to find for the search engines to index, there is literally nothing to find in the search engine results pages (also known as SERPs).

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they are first starting a small site is to only submit keywords to the search engines. They either forget or just don’t realize that those keywords also have to be placed somewhere in the text of the site or the search engines just won’t have anything to latch onto when someone uses one of your keywords to do a search. For maximum results think of your search engine submitted keywords as the “hooks” and the keywords in your website copy as the “latches.”

Another challenge is determining how many keywords or keyword phrases should appear on your web page. The number of keywords appear on the page, makes a difference to all of the search engine algorithms. They simply pick on the keywords that are the densest your pages. Of course if you choose very general or highly competitive keywords and keyword phrases you just might end up with a lot of untargeted traffic.

How does untargeted traffic end up at your site? Let’s just say you have a site promoting psychic readings. You go to the Overture Inventory Keyword Search Tool and find out that the most commonly searched words for psychic readings are “free psychic chat”, “free online psychic” and “John Edwards”. Even though these keywords have five times the popularity in terms of sheer numbers there are several reasons why you shouldn’t use them.

First of all the single keyword term “psychic” is way too general. This keyword could bring you untargeted traffic as it would includes masses of individuals looking for something besides psychic readings. They could be looking for psychic tests, psychic books and the band “Psychic TV.” They are not necessarily people who are going to buy a psychic reading.

Even though it is tempting to use keywords with high traffic such as “free online psychic” and “free psychic chat” it is best not to do it. Sometimes a search engine penalizes you if they can’t find the free offer on your site (but this is rare.) More than likely you will be spending all of your time with customers looking for a free reading which can be a pain in the ass to deal with if you are trying to sell them a service.

The keywords and keyword phrases that have the most density on your site should be the ones that improve your search engine optimization in terms of bringing you customers who intend to buy.

To make the matter of keyword density even more complex, not all search engines have the same criteria for searching out keywords. Each major search engine uses a different algorithm to calculate the way keywords are found. Some search engines are friendlier to web pages that are dense with keywords and others, like Google consider too many keywords on one page to be a nonsensical page and not worthy of being indexed. Yet another thing to consider is that these algorithms are changing all the time.

Another thing that many newcomers to SEO don’t realize is that any content that you are linked to off the site is in fact considered by most pages to be the total part of your page’s content. This is why it is so important for you to only provide anchor links to content that is truly relevant to your site’s content.

Here are some tips for how you can manually improve the keyword density and placement of key phrases on your page to perform your own search engine optimization.
Try to think like a search engines. Only one or two keywords should have a high density and the rest that you use should be of a much lower density.

Some search engine optimization experts recommend only featuring one keyword a page. However some engines like Google don’t like this as it has led to the creation of sites that have thousands of pages (called doorway pages) that boast a keyword phrase and very little information written around it. If you are going to use single keywords or keyword phrases as the focus of an article intended to create a doorway or portal for the search engines try to keep them as informative and as well-written as possible.

Unifying your web site so that just a few keywords or phrases are the theme of several pages that are linked together can also help boost your site search engine page rankings. Several pages that support each other in terms of optimized content is one way to increase the chance of improving the searchability of a keyword or keyword phrase. This is especially true if the keyword that you want to use is one that is competitive but could bring you loads traffic, as would be the case of a keyword like “psychic reading online” but not a more generic keyword such as “psychic.”

Keywords that are not as common in the search engines can be used more often on a web page. You can be more liberal with these less popular key phrases especially if they accurately and precisely describe the nature of your web business or describe one of its features or benefits.

It can’t be stressed enough that choosing unpopular keywords is not a mistake – especially if you are running a niche business. As choosing keywords that are too popular might bring you untargeted, window-shopping traffic and choosing keywords that are not frequently used might bring you an unvisited web site, the best choice of keywords are the ones that you find that have moderate popularity. It is recommended that you place these keywords somewhere on your home page and preferably in the headers, titles and in the first and concluding paragraphs. You should also make sure that these keywords are submitted to the search engines.

Another clever search engine optimization technique is to make your moderately popular keywords into a phrase that is also a link to another page on your website. As many search engines (particularly Google) favor sites with the most links this is one way to increase your site’s web presence. However also make sure that those links lead to relevant content that supports their existence.

In conclusion, the higher the keyword density of your site is, the more chances you have of your site being visible in search engine ranking pages. Web pages that are ranked the highest are the ones with pages that include as as many individual highly targeted “niche” search terms as possible. Keep this principle in mind if you are planning to use keyword density techniques to perform a search engine optimization on your own site.

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