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Selecting Keyword Phrases
Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in
vain. Choose the right keywords, and you'll see your traffic
skyrocket. Therefore, think long and hard on what keywords
people are likely to use to find you.
Have you ever heard from someone who attained a top 10 position
in a major search engine and the person was elated at how much
new traffic flooded into his or her Web site. You'd expect
them to be happy with such an outcome, right? But sometimes
you hear from someone else who also achieved a top 10 ranking
but they become disappointed when just a handful of visitors
show up. How can two people achieve high rankings and have
such markedly different outcomes? Simple. The person in the
first example selected a keyword or phrase that many people
are searching on, and the second did not!
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) Put yourself in their shoes and brainstorm.
b) See what keywords your competitors are targeting to spur
new ideas.
c) Organize and focus your keywords into short phrases, etc.
However, the best way is to stop guessing and actually SEE
what people are searching for, by using the Businelle Keywords
service. Businelle Keywords is an integrated service that will
help you brainstorm and create a list of effective keywords.
After you use this service, you'll soon have a list of dozens,
if not hundreds of keyword phrases you could target on all
of the search engines. The service illustrates what we've told
customers for years: not everyone is competing for the exact
same keywords! There are literally 1000's of opportunities
available for any business. Find YOUR niche, make sure it's
one that people are looking for, and then pursue it!
Bonus Tip: Some of the keywords are going to be much more competitive
than others. For example, ranking well on the single word "travel"
will be much more difficult than ranking in the top 10 for
"Caribbean cruises." Remember that single keywords usually
return the least targeted leads. If someone is searching on
just plain old "travel" are they:
a. Helping their child with a paper on some aspect of "travel"
b. Looking for the "travel channel"
c. Looking to plan a vacation cruise?
d. Day dreaming about time travel?
e. Looking for driving directions for their travel across the
country?
f. Looking for a travel club such as AAA?
g. Looking for the perfect backpack or hiking supplies for
a travel expedition?
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. When you target longer keyword phrases there is a much
higher likelihood that you have focused in on exactly the right
prospects. It's the difference between attracting actual buyers
versus tire kickers.
The best thing to do is to target multi-word keyword phrases
that give you the highest quality leads. For example, we sell
websites, but we don't waste our efforts trying to rank #1
on the word websites. 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.
Also, just because a phrase returns 10,000 matches does NOT
mean you have only a 1 in 10,000 chance of ranking number one.
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.
We know that the majority of Web site owners are targeting
the WRONG keywords. How did we reach this conclusion? Easy.
A recent study showed that only 34% of Web site owners knew
enough to include a simple keyword meta tag on their Web page!
Therefore, just by adding a keyword meta tag AND properly optimizing
the rest of the page for your keywords, you'll be doing far
more than the 66% of Web site owners have ever done! If you
take the time to target the RIGHT keywords, we're guessing
you'll be ahead of 99% of the world and you'll be generating
more traffic with less effort. Work smarter, not harder is
what we always say!
[Annotated from a NetIQ article]
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