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[H948]How To Choose Keywords

by John Howard Smith, Joh

Ok, now that you have spent a lot of time working on your website, you searched for a good host on the internet, you have put your products online, ready to be sold, you sit there and wonder why don't you have traffic on your website?

Well, there are a lot of websites on the internet and you should spend some time to work for your site after you have launched it in order to make it known to the internet public. You should follow a few steps that are mandatory. One of the most important steps is to find a valuable set of keywords to represent your website.

For this, first try to put down on a paper what you think that the keywords should be, what you think that your potential visitors would search for on the internet.

Then, ask a bit of help from your friends, ask them to write you down a few words or phrases that they would use to search information that you present on your site. You will actually be impressed by the fact that your keywords will probably not match theirs!!! Yes, you may be a very good developer or manager, but they are the potential clients and…they may think a bit different than you.

That's' why it would be useful for you to collaborate with people that are not that familiar with the internet medium, because they would not be constraints by patterns , they would just tell you what exactly they would search for, in a natural language. Then put your words and theirs together and eliminate the duplicates!

One interesting fact is to note if someone misspelled some words, it is perfectly possible, you know, “o” is right near “p” and “I” and it is very easy to make mistakes when typing. So, correct the word, add it, but also add at the end of the list that misspelled word…

Another thing would be to search on the internet for those websites that really stand out the others in the same line of business as yours. Use search engines such as Google or Yahoo! for this and take the first ten for example. Look at their keywords; maybe you realize that some of those keywords would be representative for your website too! In the end it is not unethical; you just keep an eye on your potential “neighbors”. Or if you want, you may say that you just learn from the best!

A very important thing to do: never put keywords on your website if they are not backed up by your website content. Not only that they don't help, but they may even hurt your positioning in search engine's result list. That's why you should provide a good content for your website, rich of keywords and interesting for your visitors!

SEO is not a simple task though; all major Search Engines are striving hard to stay a step ahead of those that try to find short cuts and unethical ways of getting rankings they do not deserve. The effort wasted in such antics, if applied in the right direction, can however, get you to your desired ranking, or get you close anyhow. Here we are going to discuss the ways to choose the applicable keywords for your site and prioritize them.

Focus on Your End Aim: Sales

A major pitfall that detracts many from achieving the goals of raised sales is the temptation of optimizing the website for the wrong keywords. Surely when you look up keywords for your products there can be those that do not apply to your products and yet they get more clicks.

The temptation is to choose keywords that raise the number of clicks; selling plastic chairs and optimizing your site for wooden ones just because they have more clicks is going to get more people to your website but when they do not find the promised product it is only going to take a click for them to move away. Your clients, instead, would go to the smart guy who optimized his site for the plastic chairs he sells. Even if 5-10% of the 1500 people searching for plastic chairs convert to sales for him, the clicks are more valuable than the 100,000 you get for wooden chairs because their next click would be on the dreaded x. What remains for you are the figures; an impressive hundred thousand clicks that lead to no revenue because there were no sales.

How to Choose Keywords: Research

Once you have your priorities worked out as to the products you want to optimize your site for, use the tools widely available on the internet to give you a history of searches carried out in the field. Wordtracker, Keyword Suggestions for Overture and Google adwords suggestion tool are some good tools to do that, though they are something that point you in the right direction, it is not by any standards the end of your research.

While searching for the right keywords for your product, it helps to look through the search engine you are concentrating on with words you think are applicable to your products. If the top ranked sites are indeed concentrating on the products you are, you are on the right track. Keep going.

The next step should be to see how your top ranked competitors have optimized their site; note the use of tags, like web page title, the meta tags, headings from 1-6 and, of course, the use of strong, bold and italics script. The process is a simple reversal of what your competitor has done; there should be enough indicators of what they have concentrated on.

After that comes the evaluation again; how applicable and how feasible would it be for you to optimize your site for the same keywords? It helps to work out a list of some 50 or so applicable keywords before you check with a Pay Per Click engine. Check the cost per click on each of your keywords; the click value would be directly proportional to its usefulness to its owner.

So a keyword that cost 5$ per click will probably make fewer sales than the click that costs 14$ per click. Try calculating the actual profit you would make on the keyword, if you were to optimize for it as well. Remember, in the real world, not all clicks are going to result in a sale, but those that do should be enough to make your efforts worthwhile if you optimize for the right words and combine it with a good SEO friendly site design.

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Both John Howard Smith & Adrian Adams are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

John Howard Smith has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Coffee Advantages and Computers and The Internet. . John Howard Smith's top article generates over 1300 views. to your Favourites.

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