Keyword Selection, Tools, Suggestions

Choosing Keywords! (Very Important!) Work smarter, not harder.

Target the wrong keywords and all your time and efforts will be wasted. Choose the right and relevant keywords, and you'll see an increase in quality traffic to your web site. Therefore, do a little brain storming on what keywords people are likely to use to find you.

There's a big difference between quality traffic and quantity traffic. Assume your web site attains top position for the keyword "equipment", you'd be very thrilled with the amount of traffic that will flood into your website but upon further review you might find out that most of your visitors are not qualified visitors. Attaining top positions for the keyword "construction equipments" or "construction equpment rentals" will yield better results as opposed to "equipment". The word "equipment" can refer to a million things.

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) Do a little brainstorming.
b) What keywords are your competitors using?
c) Refrain from using single or non-specific keywords (such as home, book, computer, etc).
d) Does your website contain text relating to the keywords that you are targeting?

Once you choose the right keywords, the next step is to optimize your website for those keywords.

There are hundreds of keywords available for most website owners. The reality is that you can't attain top positions for every keyword imaginable. The goal is Find YOUR keyword niche, make sure it's one that people are looking for, then optimize your website for that keyword / key phrase.

Bonus Tip: Some of the keywords are going to be much more competitive than others.

Ranking well on the single word "travel" will be much more difficult than ranking in the top 10 for "Caribbean cruise travel" or "all inclusive vacation Mexico." Remember that single keywords usually return the least targeted leads. If someone is searching on just plain old "travel" are they looking for:

a. Group Travel to Europe
b. Cruise Travel to the Caribbean
c. Looking for a travel agent in California
d. Travel Insurance
e. Airline Travel Tickets to Los Angeles

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. Be more specific when you are optimizing you website for keywords. When you target more specific keyword phrases you have a better chance of getting better results as opposed to more generic terms. It's the difference between attracting potential customers as opposed to web surfers.

Rranking well on the single word "real estate" will be much more difficult than ranking in the top 10 for "houses for sale Atlanta." Remember that single keywords usually return the least targeted leads. If someone is searching on just plain old "real estate" are they:

a. Looking for a real estate broker
b. Looking for a real estate agent
c. Looking to buy a house in New YorK?
d. Looking to buy a condo in a city?
e. Looking for books on real estate?
f. Looking for real estate schools?
g. Looking for commercial properties or land for sale?

The best thing to do is to target multi-word keyword phrases that give you the highest quality leads. For example, if you sold software, you wouldn't waste your efforts trying to rank #1 on the word software. 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.

The easiest road to success is to target popular keywords that your competitors have overlooked. If you are considering two phrases, each one appears to be queried with roughly the same frequency, but one returns 10,000,000 matches and another that returns 1,000,000 matches, which one should you target first? The one with the fewer matches of course! That's because you'll be competing against fewer Web sites for the top spots!

Also, just because a phrase returns 10,000,000 matches does NOT mean you have only a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of ranking at the top searches. 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.

If you take the time to target the RIGHT keywords, you'll be ahead of your competition and you'll be generating more traffic with less effort. Work smarter, not harder is what we always say.

"Attaining top positions on search engines is more cost-effective than a Yellow Page or Directory listing."

Search engine optimization is the "act of optimizing your website to search engines". Simply submitting your website to search engines is not enough. You will need to optimize your website for certain keywords or key phrases to get higher rankings.