Selecting The Optimal Keywords To Steer Visitors To Your Web Site

If you are like your neighbor who owns a website, you want your site to emerge in the top 10 of Google search results.  Unfortunately, most people don’t have the skills to truly achieve it. There are many steps to take in order to be found for words and phrases related to your web site. Moreover, taking your time to explore the best possible phrases for your site is an important step on the ladder.Many webmasters make the mistake of assuming that a ranking for one generic term associated with their website will turn their site into a money-making success. Although that one generic term may supply a good flow of traffic and brand appreciation, this does not mean the traffic will be targeted traffic that will convert into sales or become opt in subscribers. Plus the expenses of targeting that generic keyword may well tower over your return on investment. It is best for you to target several keywords related to the benefits of your product or the problems your product solves. This will not only drive traffic, but also produce that all important conversion.First of all you need to consider who your prospects are and the reasons why they will visit your web site. Do you advertise products online? Do you suggest services? Is your site more information focused? What would visitors see as their benefit for coming to your site? By understanding your potential visitors and the reasons they will visit you will better focus your efforts on important keywords.With this in mind, you can now think about the benefit or problem related terms that you think people will use to try and find your website. You should not be satisfied with simply one term. This is a trap that lots of webmasters fall into when they believe that one term will provide sufficient visitors to maintain their business. And they are shocked that their business doesn’t increase if they do attain that ranking. Reflect on all of the potential keywords and themes of your website, even draw on a thesaurus to locate related words and phrases. You can also check rival websites for ideas. It can be surprising just what terms your potential visitors will use!Once you have assembled the list of keywords, you need to use some resources to determine how widely used and competitive those terms are. Also, you’ll begin to sharpen up those keywords to be highly targeted to your site’s purpose. To start out you’ll find out how widely used your keywords are.  This job can be performed using a number of keyword suggestion tools.Keyword suggestion tools tell you which keywords were used in searches, and the number of searches that were conducted on those keywords. Entering a phrase in the tool will result in a selection of other keywords that contain your keyword, alternative phrases with a similar theme and also an estimation of the magnitude of traffic each phrase produces per month. These tools can be flawed as they query different search engines and the traffic estimations can be imprecise, but they are still useful for getting a ball park estimation of the number of searches conducted, and for suggesting various keywords you might never have thought of targeting.Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, located at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is free to use and gives you a list of suggested terms as well as the quantity of searches performed on Google. A similar tool is located at http://www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the metacrawlers Dogpile and Metacrawler. So the statistics possibly will not be representative of what’s being searched on the Internet as a whole. But Wordtracker is still beneficial for offering alternative phrases and associated keywords. Wordtracker has a subscription service. Wordtracker offers monthly or annual subscriptions.Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com is a relative newcomer to the keyword suggestion marketplace. KeywordDiscovery can query multiple search engines worldwide and provides comparable results to Wordtracker as well as other resources, but with subscriptions starting at $69.95 per month. You can try this service at no charge but you’ll receive only a subset of the results you would receive as a paid member.Once you’ve got a list of terms, you’ll need to see how competitive they are. What you;re hoping to find here are keywords that have high volume traffic but not many websites competing to rank for that term. You can use various tricks to estimate this. Any page that is optimized for a term will certainly have that keyword in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site. So by doing a search in Google and entering the queries intitle:“phrase here” and inanchor:“phrase here”, you can find the number of other pages that have been optimized for your selected keyword. The smaller the results for these searches, the less competition there is for the term. For more information about what these Google advanced search operators do, go to http://google.about.com/od/googlepowersearches/Google_Power_Searches.htm.Using these tools should have now provided you with a list of words and phrases that are significantly more targeted than your first keywords. These phrases can include breaking your term down by regional location, or a specific product. You should now be able to optimize your web site for several keywords – remember that search engines index web pages and not just websites. The good news is that all of your pages in your web site can be found in search engines, and this means that all of those pages can be optimized for different keywords! Many people are also optimizing pages for “long tail” keyword phrases. These are obscure multi word phrases that are use infrequently in searches, but are so precise they can end up being the most targeted terms and thus produce higher conversion rates. In order to include long tails phrases you must have a content rich site – the more information you have the more opportunities you have to include very specific terms that can be found somewhere on your site.So you should now finally have a list of the most effective targeted phrases for your site! As you can see, the method of selecting your terms in not something that can be taken lightly. There is considerable preparation to carry out if you desire to optimize the capability of your web site to attract organic search traffic. With your final list you are now ready to rework your pages to be found for those keywords, but that is an additional subject.