How to Choose The Right Keywords For Your Site
Selecting the right keywords is a crucial step if you want to promote your web site to the search engines.
Keywords are words which users enter into a search engine to find information on the subject of his interest. In contrast to keywords, key phrases refer to two or more keywords that users combine to form a search query, for example "music" is a keyword and "music shop" is a key phrase.
It's important that your web site is found for the right keywords and key phrases. The "right keywords" are keywords that your potential customers are actually looking for.
High search engine rankings for the wrong keywords will not bring your business many customers. On the other side, you'll get many new customers if your site is optimized for keywords and key phrases that your customers often use.
To find the right keywords and key phrases for your site, do the following:
Step 1: Build a key phrase list
Many people think that they know their ideal key phrases. They are often wrong. The reason for that is that it's hard to separate yourself from your business and to find out what and in which ways your customers think.
To find out which key phrases work best for you is to ask your customers, your friends and other people from outside your company. Business owners are often surprised that their customers don't speak the same language that they do. For example, if you have a web site about "rhinoplasty", your customers might search for "nose job" because they simply don't know the word "rhinoplasty".
Step 2: Evaluate your key phrase list
Once you have built the key phrase list, you have to find out which phrases will bring you the highest amount of traffic. You should consider the following three important aspects when choosing your key phrases:
a) Popularity
People must really use the key phrases for their searches. Services like Wordtracker help you to find out how many people search for a certain key phrase.
The higher the number, the more traffic you can expect from high search engine rankings under that keyword.
But don't stop at this point. The popularity of a keyword is not enough to determine if you should use the key phrase on your web site.
b) Relevance and specificity
These two aspects are equally important as the popularity of a key phrase. Let's assume that you want to have a high search engine ranking for "cars". Let's also assume that you only deal with Toyota cars and only in Chicago.
Although "cars" might have a much higher popularity score than "toyota cars" or "toyota dealer chicago", the keyword "cars" would also be used by people looking for Chrysler cars, Volkswagen cars and even car magazines.
With the third, longer key phrase "toyota dealer chicago", you can be reasonably sure that a much higher percentage of your visitors will be looking for what you offer. The longer phrase will also make it much easier to obtain high search engine rankings because longer key phrases are less competitive.
c) Motivation of web surfer
It's also important to understand the motivation of the user. While web surfers searching for "cars" or "toyota cars" might be interested in learning more about cars or Toyota cars, people searching for "toyota dealer chicago" are interested in purchasing a car.
Even if the first two keywords might have higher popularity numbers, the last key phrase will deliver better results for you. Even subtle distinctions between key phrases can make a difference on the quality of the traffic they attract, for example if the key phrase contains the word "free" then you might not get the visitors who are ready to buy from you.
Finding the right key phrases is vitally important for your search engine optimization campaigns. High search engine rankings for the wrong keywords can only deliver poor results.
If you start your search engine optimization campaign with the process described above, you can dramatically improve the performance of your web site.
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Internet Marketing and Search Engine Ranking Software
