Keyword Selection: Words Does Matter

The first stage of natural search engine optimization process is selection of right keywords for your business, products, services and your target market. Figure out who you are targeting and build your search engine optimization efforts around your clientage.

Keywords are the terms and phrases that your target audience uses when searching for the products and services you sell in the major search engines and web directories. Your keywords will be used in everything you do and are the key determining factor in how you rank in the search results among many of the major search engines.

Select the right keywords and you are well on your way to bringing targeted qualified visitors to your site. Select the wrong words and you've just sabotaged your entire optimization campaign.

Keyword selection fundamentals: 4 solid techniques

What you want to do first is accumulate a big list of all possible keyword terms. Ideally, each page of your web site is going to center on a different set of keywords that are specific to the content.

Here are 4 different tactics to select right keywords to create your master keywords list:

1. Brainstorming.
2. Check out your competing and industry leading sites.
3. Analize your site logs.
4. Use Keyword reseach tools. To get objective popularity information you need feedback from the search engines as to how often your candidate keywords are used as queries. There is a fine line between keywords that are popular and keywords that are too popular and too general to be useful - in addition to keyword and popularity columns add # of competitors and Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) to make final decision.

The idea is to gather all the keyword phrases you can within reason at this stage. As you work through these techniques you will want to cycle back because you will come across search terms that can expand the scope of your original efforts and open the new, more targeted phrases that you might have missed the first time around.

Popular Mistakes in Keyword Selection (Yes, You're Probably Doing One of Them).

• Do not choose single word terms - if you optimize for a phrase consisting of 2-3 keywords, you increase your chances that your website will be found. Yes, the word popularity will be less than for a single word, but the phrase will be more focused and your traffic will be more relevant.
• Don't try to optimize your home page for every one of your keywords. Focus your pages so 2-3 keywords are relevant per page. Spread out the related keywords on other pages in your site. This will create additional entry pages for visitors to enter your site on. Select 10 pages on your site and target 2-3 phrases per page as appropriate. Since each page is targeted at specific phrases, they will score higher than a "one size fits all" solution.
• After you strategically place your keywords on your site, be sure to proof-read your pages - and read it out loud. Make sure the text on your pages sounds natural, not artificially stuffed with keywords. Remember, you have to please human visitors to your site as well as search engines.
• Make sure your keywords are relevant for your site. Don't just pick something off the Top Search Keywords list to try to drive traffic to your site. Optimizing for "Britney Spears" only makes sense if your site actually is about Britney Spears. The search engines learned that scam ages ago and will at best, ignore them, or worst, penalize you. There's no reason to spam if you optimize your page correctly.
• While there are the real importance of keyword presence in URL (in your file names in other words) in Yahoo, in case of competitive keywords, Google takes presence of keywords in URL as overoptimization and penalizes a page. Please read how keywords in URL may influence your rank.

Keyword Selection: The Bottom Line.

To improve the conversion rate of your website, first find the keywords people are using related to your industry, make sure that the search results from the keywords you select are relevant to your industry, and then optimize your site for those phrases. Finally, measure and test those phrases so that you have the best chance of converting your search engine visitors into customers, clients, or subscribers.