Selecting Keyword Phrases
Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts
will be in vain. Choose the right keywords, and you'll see your
traffic skyrocket. Therefore, think long and hard on what
keywords people are likely to use to find you.
Have you ever heard from someone who attained a top 10 position
in a major search engine and the person was elated at how much
new traffic flooded into his or her Web site. You'd expect them
to be happy with such an outcome, right? But sometimes you hear
from someone else who also achieved a top 10 ranking but they
become disappointed when just a handful of visitors show up. How
can two people achieve high rankings and have such markedly
different outcomes? Simple. The person in the first example
selected a keyword or phrase that many people are searching on,
and the second did not!
The question to ask yourself is how do you really know if you're
optimizing your pages for keywords that Web surfers are looking
for? There are several good techniques you can apply to
determine what people might be searching for:
a) Put yourself in their shoes and brainstorm.
b) See what keywords your competitors are targeting to spur new
ideas.
c) Organize and focus your keywords into short phrases, etc.
However, the best way is to stop guessing and actually SEE what
people are searching for, by using the Businelle Keywords
service. Businelle Keywords is an integrated service that will
help you brainstorm and create a list of effective keywords.
After you use this service, you'll soon have a list of dozens,
if not hundreds of keyword phrases you could target on all of
the search engines. The service illustrates what we've told
customers for years: not everyone is competing for the exact
same keywords! There are literally 1000's of opportunities
available for any business. Find YOUR niche, make sure it's one
that people are looking for, and then pursue it!
Bonus Tip: Some of the keywords are going to be much more
competitive than others. For example, ranking well on the single
word "travel" will be much more difficult than ranking in the
top 10 for "Caribbean cruises." Remember that single keywords
usually return the least targeted leads. If someone is searching
on just plain old "travel" are they:
a. Helping their child with a paper on some
aspect of "travel"
b. Looking for the "travel channel"
c. Looking to plan a vacation cruise?
d. Day dreaming about time travel?
e. Looking for driving directions for their travel across the
country?
f. Looking for a travel club such as AAA?
g. Looking for the perfect backpack or hiking supplies for a
travel expedition?
If you own a travel agency that specialized in
vacation cruises and optimized your site for the single keyword
"travel," only a limited number of the people identified in the
example above would be qualified prospects. You'd find a great
number of search engine referrals to your site if you attained a
good ranking on the keyword, but many of them would select the
"back" button in their browsers, turn around and effectively
walk out of your store! That's not the outcome you'd be looking
for. When you target longer keyword phrases there is a much
higher likelihood that you have focused in on exactly the right
prospects. It's the difference between attracting actual buyers
versus tire kickers.
The best thing to do is to target multi-word keyword phrases
that give you the highest quality leads. For example, we sell
websites, but we don't waste our efforts trying to rank #1 on
the word websites. That's just too general, not to mention too
competitive.
Ideally, you will want to target keyword phrases that are
queried with some frequency, that are specific to your Web site,
but less competitive.
Also, just because a phrase returns 10,000 matches does NOT mean
you have only a 1 in 10,000 chance of ranking number one. If you
simply submitted your page and did nothing else, then yes, your
odds of ranking near the top are low. Discovering the "magic"
quantity of keywords and tags to rank in the top 10 is also next
to impossible to do by hand.
We know that the majority of Web site owners are targeting the
WRONG keywords. How did we reach this conclusion? Easy. A recent
study showed that only 34% of Web site owners knew enough to
include a simple keyword meta tag on their Web page! Therefore,
just by adding a keyword meta tag AND properly optimizing the
rest of the page for your keywords, you'll be doing far more
than the 66% of Web site owners have ever done! If you take the
time to target the RIGHT keywords, we're guessing you'll be
ahead of 99% of the world and you'll be generating more traffic
with less effort. Work smarter, not harder is what we always
say!
[Annotated from a NetIQ article]
