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Key Words
An essential element in driving traffic to
your site.
By Kerry Plowright
Over eighty percent of people use search engines to find product and
services.
The objective of search engines is to deliver a quality result to people
searching on the web for a product or service. These results will
hopefully be websites which are relevant and have good content. These
sites have not been viewed or ranked by a person at the search engine
company but instead have been indexed and listed after being 'crawled' by
what we call a spider. This spider is a piece of software which on finding
your site, crawls through each page, following links. Then according to an
algorithm built into the spider, it ranks your site in its importance.
There are so many sites it is impossible to physically
review each one, let alone review each site on a regular basis. However,
search engine spiders or metacrawlers can do this job automatically and
regularly.
Your ranking dictates where your listing will appear when
people search for your primary keyword or term. Ideally you need to be on
the first page of results.
The search engine spider users an algorithm designed to weigh up several
factors that effectively judge your site and rank it. This ranking process
will include the evaluation of your keywords, link popularity and a number
of other factors. Now, the whole point of optimising pages is to help this
poor old search spider figure out what YOUR essential keywords and phrases
are. So first of all you need to figure out what they should be and then
how do you weave them into your site in a way the search engine spider
will take notice.
This is what we are going to do:
• Select your keywords
• Analyse their competitiveness
• Optimise your website with them.
Selecting a Keyword
Write down a list of keywords you think people will use to search for your
products. Now look at your competitors and write down any new ideas.
Having done that search for some alternatives using tools like:
https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
simply paste in your most promising keywords to view alternate
suggestions produced from Google's database. Naturally some terms are
searched for more than others. It is pointless having a word or term that
no one searches for. To evaluate how many times a word or term is searched
for, Overture have a great tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Now test your keywords here.
After all of this you will have a pretty good idea of
which key words or phrases you want to use. When you select a keyword, it
is pointless picking keywords where you have to compete with larger
players. For example, if you picked a keyword in the music industry that
the likes of Sony and other large players use, you will not be able to
match their link popularity. Therefore, regardless of the effort you put
into your optimisation, all these companies will rank ahead of you.
Analyse Your Keyword Competitiveness
One way to determine the competitiveness of a key word is to use a tool
that evaluates how much companies are actually paying a PPC (Pay Per
Click) for a visitor. A good tool is:
http://uvbidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/
When you search the internet through a search engine you
use a word, or combination of words to find what you want. We refer to
these as key words and key word phrases and terms. One of the most
important assessments a spider makes is the amount of times specific
phrases and words appear on your pages. This is what we call keyword
density. To successfully rank highly in the search engines, the words on
your Web pages should never be an afterthought but a major investment in
your search engine optimisation campaign.
As always, have a good look at your competitors and look
at what key words and phrases they focus on.
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Include your key word and phrase in your page title.
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Include your key word and phrase in your description
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Have a H1 heading at the top of the page that includes the
key words and phrase.
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Include your key word and phrase several times throughout
the body text.
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If possible link keywords to a relevant page.
To help in your research and analysis I have listed some
more free tools I find really useful.
Keyword Count
http://www.keywordcount.com/
Here you can enter a URL, and this free web-based service will report back
on the number of times and percentages various keywords appear within it.
Keyword Density
http://www.keyworddensity.com/
At this site you can specify a keyword or search phrase, and this
free service will show you how often it appears on any two web pages that
you select. On the results page, selecting the "Search Engine Profiles"
option and re-running the analysis shows you the estimated percentage for
each major search engine, rather than for a generic search engine
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 About
the Author: Kerry Plowright founded ezimerchant in 1996 and was
the first to offer an affordable, packaged ecommerce solution to
small and medium business. Since then Kerry has helped thousands of
business make hundreds of millions of dollars on the internet and is
arguably Australia’s leading authority on small business and the
internet. Kerry recently sold the ezimerchant business which is now
the most widely used solution in Australia in addition to being sold
in Japan, the USA and UK. Kerry now offers his expertise to selected
businesses desiring to establish or improve their online presence.
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