Posts Tagged ‘choosing keywords’

Diversifying Your Keywords

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Ask yourself, “What do I want people to search for to end up at my website?” This is the first place to start when selecting the keywords or phrases you want your website to compete for in Google and other search engines.

You might want to think about the products and/or services you sell, and use those as your keywords. Remember, each separate page of your website can be optimized for a different group of keywords. For example, if your company is a bicycle repair business, you can have one page in your website competing for keywords related to “bicycle tires” while having another page of your site competing for keywords related to “bicycle brakes”…of course, you’ll want to ensure that each page is in fact about each of those keywords!

All too often I come across website owners who think their website can only focus around one main keyword. They think that just because their site is about bike repairs, they are limited to just that keyword – “bike repairs”. In fact, depending on the size of your site, you can compete for hundreds if not thousands of separate keywords!

Each page of your website is devoted to its own sub-theme. Often, you’ll see websites with links to “about us”, “products”, “contact us”, etc. Each of these sub-pages can be optimized according to its own theme. Using the bike repair store example, the website can have a separate page devoted to each type of product and/or repair they do, and in doing so they are competing for dozens of separate keywords while at the same time receiving dozens of times more traffic than they would by just competing for one keyword. For example, using a sub-page about bicycle tires, possible keywords could be “bike tires”, “mountain bike tires”, “bicycle tire repairs”, “best bicycle tires”, etc.

If you’re a bigger company with a large website that is constantly updating your product set, you’ll want to stay on top of the SEO aspect of your site to make sure the keywords you’re competing for accurately reflect the content displayed on the corresponding page. For that matter, you’ll want to do the same even if you’re a smaller company. Despite not having the need to update their sites as much, smaller companies should still stay on top of their SEO endeavors to ensure proper keyword testing – solidifying their sites with the most efficient keyword sets.

As you can tell, SEO is not a one-and-done job. It’s a task every website owner is going to need to execute on an ongoing basis if they plan on staying ahead of their competition. If managed properly, SEO can be the most cost-effective method of revenue generation available.

How To Choose the Right Keywords

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

A keyword, for those unfamiliar with the term in its online reference, is a word or phrase you want people to search to find your website through search engines like Google. To choose the right keywords, you’ll want to take a look at what products, services or information your company and website offer. Unless you’re a huge company with a widely known brand, you’ll probably want to stay away from using your company name as the sole keyword on your website. After all, the whole idea behind SEO is to help get you traffic through the search engines for words and phrases people search who do not necessarily know of your business.

Start by making a list of your most popular products or services. If your business were a bicycle repair business, you might want to begin with a couple general phrases like “bike repair”, “bike repairs”, “bicycle repairs”, etc. Once you’ve made a short list like this, consider plugging them in to an automated keyword generator like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, a personal favourite of mine. Once you enter in your starting phrases, the service will spit out dozens of related keyword combinations you may not have even considered using on your site.

I highly suggest keeping a list or spreadsheet with all these combinations, as part of a well managed SEO campaign is to test and experiment with different pertinent keyword combinations to ensure the most effective keywords are being used on your site.

Once you have a list of possible keyword combinations, start integrating them one at a time into your website and keep track of traffic brought in by each keyword using statistics software like Google’s free Analytics service. Even if you have a keyword on your site bringing in a significant amount of traffic, don’t be afraid to experiment with other keywords as long as they are relevant to the content on your website. That said, as long as a keyword accurately describes what’s being offered on that particular page, there is no such thing as a wrong keyword.