Choosing The Right Keywords

Part of basic seo has to do with keywords and keyphrases. The search engines look for relevant content when they visit your site. They want to see how closely your content matches the theme of your web pages. Some search engines check your meta tags in the html code of your pages for keywords and weigh them against the words in the text content of your pages. If there is a close relationship between the tag keywords and the text content on the page it will help boost your ranking.

So how do you determine what keywords and phrases to use? You could try and guess what keywords to use and you might be accurate for some but really in order to avoid hit-and-miss you need to know exactly what people are searching on when they go to a search engine. It stands to reason if you use the same keywords and phrases they are entering into the search engine for query, you're going to get some hits.

There are some great tools on the web that will help you discover what keywords people are searching on every day when they query the search engines. Word Tracker for example, has an online service where you can rent time using their data-base to find relevant keywords. Plan your searches and rent a day or two - it's reasonably priced. Plug a basic keyword into Word Tracker that describes your site theme, company service or products and watch it return hundreds of possible related keywords and phrases.

I also use a software tool called Keywords Analyzer, which is very cost-effective and produces some great results from the major search engines. If your particular web theme is very popular, it may be difficult to rank high in the search engine return pages for the top keywords because of the amount of competition for them from other web pages. What you want to do is find keywords which are searched on often but where there is little competition. Keyword Results Analyzer not only shows the number of times a given keyword or phrase is searched on it also shows you how many web pages are using the same keyword. Obviously if there is a fair number of searches for that keyword and not very many pages competing for it, then chances are good you can rank high in the serps for that keyword.You also have the option of checking the number of Google and Overture Pay-Per-Click Campaigns are bidding on that keyword. This comes in handy if you plan on launching a ppc campaign of your own somewhere down the line.

If your budget is limited and you want to try a free keyword tool to get the hang of how this works, check out Good Keywords. It's features are somewhat limited but it's a great place to start.

Break your internal pages down into sub-themes. If your site is about scapbooking, each internal page should be about one specific sub-theme relating to the main theme. When you're doing your keyword research you need to find keywords that are relevant for each pages sub-theme. I like to pick a top one and two or three others to support the top keyword.

So where do you put the keywords in your pages? Well, recently I have observed that of the three top search engines: Google, Yahoo! & MSN, the latter 2 seem to look more closely at your meta title tag, description tag and keyword tag. Google seems to place less importance on keywords in meta tags than the other two. But you want to try and optimize your site as best you can to get top rankings with all three search engines, so make sure you add the keywords to your meta tags.

There is much speculation about what the actual keyword density on your pages should be. Some say no more than 3 or 4%, while others advocate as much as 8% of the pages text content be allocated to keywords. One thing is true: The keywords should be 'sprinkled' throughout your web pages text in a logical, readable fashion. Make the text flow from idea to idea with the keywords enhancing the overall gist of what you're trying to convey to your visitor.

Keywords should also be used as text links in your site menu. If you're using java script to create your menu buttons, create hyper-text links using keywords and weave them throughout the pages as you discuss what your site is all about. Using the Main page to give a general over-view of your sites content gives you an opportunity to add the keyword links into the text. Search engines don't like crawling through java script - some of them can but it's much easier to get them to index the internal pages of your site if they can crawl through text links.

Keyword selection and placement is just one factor in ranking high in the serps but if you don't do it properly you're either not going to get much traffic at all or you're going to get people who were looking for something that you don't offer. Remember - the idea is to optimize your site for "Targeted Traffic" - that means people who are looking for exactly what you have to offer them!

Brad Knell is the webmaster and consultant at http://www.better-search-solutions featuring SEO Tool Box, a complete resource for people who want to do their own search engine optimization.