Optimize My Web Site with Keywords - A How-To Guide

Here are the five most common reasons why the information search process is often not successful:

1. Choosing keywords is both an art and a science:

Language is an imperfect thing, and even the most articulate Internet user among us may have trouble trying to express the information she is looking for in terms of adequate keywords.

2. Not all users know about the various input rules:

Most people who search the Web just type in a word or phrase they are looking for. However, there are actually various rules, or protocols, such as Boolean search techniques (e.g., the use of OR, AND, NOT) and the use of quotation marks around the keyword phrase ("KEYWORD") that can have a strong bearing on the search results. Since lack of knowledge for most users means that searches often yield inadequate search results for users.

3. People make mistakes:

Most people type very fast and often do not spell check their search terms before submitting them. The result of this occasional user error is that a large percentage of keyword search terms entered into search engines are either misspelled or lack important elements that the user had intended to input into the search engine.

4. Each search engine is unique:

Each search engine approaches the process of matching the user's keywords to potentially-relevant content matches a little differently from the others. The formula that each search engine uses is called a matching algorithm. Even the biggest search engines like Google and Yahoo! are constantly altering their search algorithms, and they do not release these to the public! The upshot is that, depending upon which search engine an information searcher is using, they can get entirely different search results when using different search engines.

5. Not all content is keyword optimized:

The final crucial fact about information search that often stands between a user and the information they are looking for is that the creators of content (i.e., Web sites, blogs, press releases, online articles, online ads, white papers, video titles, image file names, sound file names, etc.) often do not pay enough attention to optimizing their keywords for a search. However, there is a silver lining to this: those content creators (read: other Web site owners) who take advantage of keyword optimization techniques can overcome most or all of the five limitations listed above in terms of attracting viable traffic to your site.

Keyword optimization merely means embedding the most important elements of your site's content with keywords that are designed to get noticed by search engines. By researching which keywords are optimal for their Web site or other piece of content on the Internet, a Web site owner or marketer can significantly increase the number of daily hits to their Web site.

Important elements of a Web site to optimize are page or section titles, image titles, metatags and words that appear frequently in the main content portions of the site.

Optimal keywords are those that meet the following three conditions. Optimal keywords:

a. are relevant to your Web site or business

b. experience a high number of searches on a daily basis as per the leading search engines (e.g., Google and Yahoo!)

c. have a relatively low number of competing search engine results on search engines

To find optimal keywords, the first step is to do some thinking about your Web site: what type of attention would you like your site to attract? What type of words or phrases would you like to associate with it? Create a short list of 10 or more words that describe your site and what makes it unique. At this point, you have at least initially satisfied condition "a" above: finding words that are relevant to your Web site or business.

To find keywords that satisfy conditions "b" (frequently-searched) and "c" (relatively low number of search engine results) you are going to need a keyword tool.

A keyword tool is an online tool that has a database of all of the keyword terms actually being searched for on the Internet in recent days or weeks. Because the tool reveals keywords that were actually searched, it also reveals common misspellings for often-searched words, for example.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I believe that the subscription-based Wordtracker® is the best keyword search tool available today. You can get a free trial here:

www.Wordtracker-Free-Trial.com

The basic steps of using Wordtracker® are:

1. choose one of the keywords from the list you created above and enter it into the tool

2. the tool will generate for you a large list (1 to 300) of related keywords

3. add those that seem related to your site to your shopping cart

4. on the final page of the series, you may choose to rank the words by competitiveness. Wordtracker® uses a competitiveness index called "KEI" which automatically rates each term and then sorts the resulting list accordingly: the words at the top of the list have a combination of the highest daily number of searches AND the lowest count of Web sites that feature those keywords.

5. the final step is of course to choose keywords that are highest on the list.

Final hint: some of the most competetive keywords that your tool reveals will be misspelled words that are commonly entered into search engines. While you cannot in most cases use these as keyword-optimized content in your site, you CAN use them as metadata tags (tags that are embedded in your site but that do not show up visually).

Find out how you can get a (free) SEO audit for your website at: www.Custom-SEO-Audit.com.