How to Choose Keywords for Your Website

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Having a well-built and up to date web page and promoting it so that many thousand of people can see the products and services you are selling is the key behind earning a lot of money from doing business online. However, you must not stop at building the site and updating it. People must be able to see it if you want to increase the number of potential customers and you can only do so by optimizing your web page for search engines. Most people use popular search engines when looking for certain products and services and that is why having a site optimized for these search engines is very important. Having the correct keywords and keyword density is one of the most important things when considering creating a web site to support your business. Actually, you should have in mind the list of keywords you want to add to your site before you even start creating it. Search engines offer a series of search engine optimization services and this should be a good starting point. If you are planning an English web site, you can look at websites such as wordtracker.com or inventory.overture.com. Therefore, the first logical step is to make out a list of keywords that should appear on your webpage. Next, try to find out what keywords your competitors are using, as you can find some more relevant information this way.

You can use two methods: optimizing your website for a small number of very popular keywords, or very many less popular keywords. You will see that in practice these methods are very well combined many times. There is a downside to using keywords as a main visitor's attraction method: all sites uses it and it is harder for a newly developed webpage to get even close to the rankings of large, old sites that use similar keywords. One of the best ways to increase traffic to your site is to attract targeted visitors when thinking your search engine optimization methods. Remember, targeted visitors are those people that come to your site and who are searching for the products you are selling and are willing to buy those products or services. It is the number of targeted visitors that come to your site that should interest you and not the total amount of traffic. From the list of keywords, that you have gathered you must choose the core keywords for which you will optimize your web page. You will not be the only one using those keywords on your site, thus the competition for the selected keywords is very high. In order to see you site fits in once launched, you must have an idea about exactly how competitive your web page is. You can do this by reviewing a set of data for the first ten results displayed by the search engine when using the selected keywords. Among the data you should look at is the average Page Rank of each of the displayed results, the average number of links that guides people to these web pages. Other elements you should look at are the approximate number of pages on the Internet that contain the selected keywords (the total number of results displayed by the search engine) and the number of pages on the Internet that contain exact matches to the keyword phrase. By having all these numbers in mind, you can make an idea about your competition on those keywords and how easy or how hard it will be for you to get a top ranking for your web page.

Now that you have gathered enough information to make a thorough examination of the competition rate for all of your keyword phrases, you can go on to include a series of key phrases with moderate popularity but having an acceptable competition rate, which you can use to further promote and optimize your site.

Because the services provided by search engines about keywords and keywords statistics, do not be surprised if at first you will not be able to obtain the most efficient list of keywords from the beginning. After you have launched your web page, you can further analyze traffic and keywords statistics to finely tune your site. Only after launching your site you will be able to see the search engine's rating of your site for particular phrases and you will also have the number of visits to your site for these phrases. Now you can see what key phrases are attracting people that use search engines to your site and what keywords do not work as efficient. If you notice that certain key phrases are not efficient in attracting traffic to your page, you can take measure in that direction: you can edit them, or you can take then out altogether. You may also discover that a keyword that you did not take into consideration very much at the beginning is bringing you more targeted visitors than one that you considered important and you can optimize your web site accordingly. If you know that keywords are efficient in bringing you targeted traffic, you can increase their frequency throughout your web page or even create new pages around those keywords and phrases. The techniques of search engine optimization are changing all the time and what had proven highly efficient some time ago may not be appropriate in the future. Therefore, that is why you will need to changes the keywords in time if you see that the traffic numbers are not satisfactory anymore. Nothing is built forever and you will constantly need to update both your web page and your SEO methods to been in touch with the current developments.

Also, remember that your main page attracts up to 50% of all the search traffic, and because it has the highest visibility in search engines, optimizing it for search engines and for the most popular queries related to your business field should be a top priority.

There are also a lot of tools out there that can help you to research your keywords. Typing "SEO Tools" in any search engine will return huge amount of useful SEO tools. There are also tools for link building, page research, marketing effectiveness, etc

How a Search Engine Works

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The best place to begin before optimizing your site is to try and understand a little of how a search engine spider works. At a very basic level, it will trawl through your page, and give it ‘points’ for certain things. Some it places more importance on than others, but put simply, the more of these things that you have, the more points you get and the higher your rating will be.

Before going into more detail on these areas, something you’ll need to take into consideration is frames. Web developers are generally split into two camps on this issue, and it’s reasonably safe to say that most people either love them or hate them. Frames undoubtedly do have their advantages, but if you’re trying to build a site that’s optimized for spiders, then they can only cause trouble.

If you make a site without frames, you allow the search engines to reference your page quickly and easily. But if you do decide to build inside a frameset, then you’ll have to make use of the "noframes" tag. However, for the sake of this tutorial lets assume that you’ve chosen to forgo frames.

Onto the Important Stuff: Meta Tags and More

By now, just about everyone is aware of the tags that are available to developers, so it’s helpful to get these right from the beginning. Tedious as it may sound, always write individual meta code for each page of your site, as that way it has a greater chance of coming up through a search. By trying to condense the whole content of your site into a few keywords for one page, you’re ruining your chances.

You have several tags to choose from: "meta name =" ”keywords”" and "meta name =" “description”" being the most important two. Always put your most important words and phrases at the front. As a rule, you should also keep the tags short and sweet. A spider will attach more importance to five words than to fifty, so make those five words count. Pick out words that you think people will be searching for to get to your site. You don’t need to make these bold or all caps, the formatting inside tags has no real relevance to the spiders.

Once you’ve picked your keywords and phrases for a page, you’ll want to ensure that they appear as often as possible within the text. Repetition of the words re-enforces their relevance to a search engine, so if your site is dedicated to anime, put “anime” in the copy as often as you can without it losing clarity.

There are plenty of ways to include your keywords multiple times on a page. Things like drop-down menus use them, as do breadcrumb trails. If your site design incorporates them, all to the good.

It’s also worth noting that a search engine will rate a keyword higher than normal if it is formatted in some way. As an example, lets the anime page again. You’d like a title in the main text to say ‘Anime Characters’. Putting the phrase into an tag, and link it either to a relevant page or itself. Now, use JavaScript to keep the cursor to a default on rollover. Instead of a hand indicating a link, the user will see a normal cursor. Should they happen to click on the text, the link will work for them.

You can add titles to links too, similar to an "alt" tag. They operate in a very similar way to the displaying a hover caption when the link is rolled over. Duplicate your keywords in here to boost the number of times it appears in your page. This isn’t ideal though, as it does tend to interfere with the layout of the screen. If you don’t mind the caption though, it’s another possibility for you to use.

In addition to all of this, spiders will take note of all the outbound links on the page, and check out where they go. If the destination page is also packed full of similar keywords and phrases, then the link rates even higher. This is another reason why it’s worthwhile tailoring each page individually.

It’s not just outbound links either, search engines will also see how many external sites link to your own. Generally, the more the better, and again, if the link is from a source with similar keywords and a good rating, your own standing is increased.

Another thing to remember is that a search engine places higher importance on the start of the page’s code than on the end. So ideally, you want all your newly optimized text with keywords to come right under the "body" tag. But we all know that if you’re building a site, there’s generally a lot of code written before you ever get to the main content. So how can you get round this?

If you remove all your JavaScript (providing you have any of course) to an external .js file and link to it, that will save you a lot of space to bump up the important pieces of text.

You can also employ layers to shift the order of the code round a little without screwing up your design. By dividing the page up into layers, you can place layers with keywords right up the top and layers with less important design elements underneath, whilst still employing things like tables on the main page.

Of course this isn’t always ideal. Sometimes your design won’t allow you to work this way. But as with all of the points given above, you need to reach a compromise between the looks of the site and getting it rated with engines. Hopefully though, you should now have an even better idea of how to make your site top of Google.