Keywords, choose them Wisely
By Dwayne Goerges
By now you have likely heard that keywords are extremely important in having search engines display your website.
So how do you choose them? Guess? Ask a friend? Check successful competitors
sites? There is a better way!
First let’s digress. There are a lot of things that affect your ranking in
search engines and ultimately how many sales you make from you website. The
quality and amount of content on your website, how many links point to your
website, what keywords are used, how they are used, even the age of your site
can play a factor. Large companies spend thousands of dollars on getting
their companies to the top of the rankings and keeping them there. If you’re a
small company trying to compete with these large budgets, you are likely to
come up short.
So, how can a small business with a far more moderate budget
compete? Niche Marketing! People searching for information on products
don’t always use the keywords you would expect them to use. And just because a
competitor has a large enough budget to reach the top with a certain keyword or
phrase doesn’t mean you will be able to. Niche phrases are sets of keywords
that people are using to search in the search engines. If you are able to rate
high on these niche phrases you will see an increase of traffic to your
site. To find out what words people are using you need to use one of the word
tracking sites. These sites find out from the search engines exactly what
phrases your potential customers are using.
For example a Google search of “used cars” turned up 36,900,000
results; if you don’t show up in the first 10-30 results it is very unlikely
you will ever have someone click on your site. In this case every major car
dealer and thousands of smaller dealers are competing for those same 10-30
spaces. You have a huge amount of competition. Likely though your potential
customers also see this huge number and if he or she can’t find what they are
looking for they will try to limit the search. If they are looking for a local
dealer they may try adding a city. My office is near Redding California. By
entering “used cars Redding”, I still receive 205, 000 results. That’s a lot
closer and maybe I could optimize my pages to reach near the top, BUT will my
efforts really produce the results I want?
So far I have only guessed that my potential customers are
really using this search phrase. If I check my competitor’s site I will only be
able to see their guesses. That is where word tracking comes to play. There are
a number of sites that offer word-tracking services. Some are free, others
charge for their service. The most cost effective service I have found is
WordTracker.com . This is the site we will use if you have
ADAC Programming do your keyword search for you.
The advantage I’ve found using WordTracker.com
over the free sites is that at the free sites you are
told how many times a word has been searched for but there is little or no
other information provided. These extra features are what help you to make the
best decision on your keywords. These features include keyword suggestions
based on your starting keyword, and most importantly the ratio of how many
people use that phrase verses how many competitors are using the phrase. It
takes a little time to learn how to make the best use of word tracking
software, but it is well worth the effort. If you are having someone else
optimize your site, insist that they find out what phrases are being used.
Using word tracking you will be able to tell how much
competition you have for each phrase and how often the phrase gets used, so
that you can optimize a website page for phrases that will get clicks to your
site. To illustrate the point, would you rather have 0% of the clicks resulting
from 1000 searches or 20% of the clicks resulting from 100 searches? If you
choose keyword phrases that will put you at the top of the search engines lists
you are far more likely to see results you want.
That’s the benefit of choosing your keywords wisely!
Article Source:
ADAC Programming