Identify Keywords
| In Chapter 2, "Picking a Customer Niche," we discussed how to research and identify keywords or keyword phrases that consumers will use to search for your product or services. This is the most important step in optimizing your site. Your research will reveal keywords and keyword phrases you never new consumers used to find websites like yours. For example, if I type in the phrase "baby toys" in Overture's keyword selector tool, I get a listing of 100 other keyword phrase variations and how many searches were performed using each phrase during the last month. The phrase "baby toys" returned results such as "toy and baby", "baby Einstein toy", "baby learning toy", "toy baby doll", "baby bath doll", and more. Take a look at the results and identify which keyword phrases apply to your business. Only use the ones you think are relevant and then rank them by number of searches. This will help you prioritize which keywords to target. A site may spend all its time on optimizing for "baby toys" but convert a very low percent of traffic to buyers if the site specializes in a narrow range of products that appeal only to a small subset of the visitors searching for "baby toys." The less popular keyword phrases are less expensive and can create the highest ROI. Remember, even though some keywords may not be as popular, a combination of these low-volume keywords can produce more traffic than some of the more popular keywords. The research will help you target other related keywords and keyword phrases that may not be as competitive. Tip: Using Keyword Phrases Consider optimizing your site for keyword phrases (groups of keywords). Keyword phrases are usually less competitive, have a higher conversion rate, and cost less when using pay-per-click advertising services. Misspellings, plurals and synonyms are also good keywords to target. Also, don't forget to check out your competition. Take a look at their source code and see whether any of their keywords pertain to your business. Take advantage of their research. To do this, simply go to your competitor's web page, and select View, then slide down to Source and, there they are: These are the keywords and keyword phrases that your competition thinks best describe its business. The Importance of Meta TagsNow, let's take a closer look at meta tags. The meta tags are important to getting a good ranking in the search results. Meta tags come in two flavors description meta tags and keyword meta tags. The description meta tag is a brief description (about 100200 characters) of what's on a web page. The description meta tag looks something like this:
The other meta tag is the keyword tag. Create a set of keyword phrases that explain your page or site and list them in the meta tag separated by commas. After you have your keywords, turn them into key phrases. Be careful about repeating a key phrase. This sends up a red flag for the search engines. Repeating the same keyword more than five times raises another red flag. Do these and many of the search engines will penalize you and hurt you in the search rankings, or not list that page at all. Here's an example of a keyword meta tag:
Finally, pay attention to the first paragraph of the web page you are registering with the search engines. The first paragraph of your web page should duplicate and expand upon everything in your title and meta tags. Make sure the first paragraph has all your key phrases in it. Turn those keywords, key phrases, and title into a welcoming message that will make a good first impression on the consumer visiting your site. Remember you only get one chance to make a first impression with today's web shoppers. Search experts also point out that keywords/phrases may get better weight when they appear in headings and bold type such as an H1 or H2. Also, the keywords need to be in the ALT tags, internal hyperlinks, anchors, and even in the names of the GIFs and JPEGs. |
EAN: 2147483647
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