Beginner's Guide to Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Finding good Keywords and Keyword Phrases

First, be sure in your own mind what your web site is about. Obvious, yet not as simple as it may seem. Is it a site about "My Business"? Or, do you want people, looking for the product you offer, to find your business, and choose your web site, before all others, as the ebusiness that they will buy from?

What is that product? Define it in words and write down those words. Your site is about a product and not about "My Business". Focus your attention on that product and how you are going to bring it to the attention of users of the world wide web.

Write down keywords that define your site. Start with the 3 to 6 keywords or phrases which define your business. Expand to 50 - 100 keywords, then into keyword phrases which summarise the products and information that you offer. Use similes where possible, not everyone will be using your choice of keywords and phrases so expand your list to cover all these possibilities as well. Think globally. Avoid buzz words used within your industry which are not household words. Likewise, ignore your business name for this exercise.

How would the man in the street describe your product? Blue widgets, widgets for the gizmo, widgets less than £1, widgets in London are all possibilities. The Beginner's Guide to Keywords and Keyword Phrases aims to explain why all possibilities need to be considered.

There are millions of people who are your potential customers. Each has their own language and use of phrase for your product. If you keep describing it using the same words again and again, those are the only words that will appear on your site. Those same words are the words that the search engines will use to evaluate what your site is about. There may be ten, twenty or fifty other words which could equally be used by someone to describe your product. If you ignore those words you are cutting yourself off from any traffic from the users of those words.

Brainstorm with friends and others in the same industry until you find as many different words as possible to describe your product. Spend time of this and keep coming back to your list, writting down new words, keywords and phrases as they come to mind. On this page there are links to sites containing tools which may help you to discover even more variations.

The next section shows you how to evaluate your list of words and phrases to discover those of most value to your site. Which words will bring you targeted and motivated visitors who will want to buy your product?

Evaluating Keywords and Keyword Phrases

The start of Search Engine Optimization

Evaluate the list of keywords and keyword phrases from the point of view of the search engine or web directory - Google, HotBot, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, etc. There are millions of web sites and pages on the world wide web. Your aim: to find words which will make your site number one in search engine results.

How do you search for something on the web? You type a word or two into the search box and pages of web sites are offered to you. If you do not see what you are looking for on the first few pages, you refine your search phrases and continue with this refining process until you find what you are looking for.

Type your keyword phrases into a search engine. For this exercise it is recommended to use either Yahoo! or MSN as they weight page content relevance higher than Google. View the web sites that come up on the first page of the search engine results. Do these sites mirror your ebusiness? The search engine aims to place the most relevant results for the keyword phrases you enter on the first page of search engine results - web pages highly optimized for those keyword phrases. Visit the sites listed on the 10th page of the search engine results. These pages are not as well optimised or not as relevant for your choice of keywords and keyword phrases. Look and learn what keyword phrases your site needs to contain for the search engine to place it within the top 10 results.

Make use of the cache facility offered by the search engines to see how many times those keywords have been used by the sites in the top 10 results. The cache also gives you the view of the page as it was when ranked by the search engine rather than the current view of the page. You need to have javascript disabled for this exercise as javascript can be used to change the content of the page from that which is ranked by the search engines. Also have styles and graphics turned off so that you can view text which may otherwise be hidden or difficult to read because text and background use the same colours.

You are looking for the 3 or 4 keywords which define your ecommerce site in such a way that a search engine will offer your web site to visitors above any other ebusiness.

There are two quick ways of doing this. You can go to Wordtracker who offer a free service which will search the web and evaluate your keywords, or you can use your favourite search engine and make a note of how many results are found for your preferred phrases. Some search engines even offer help with searching on alternate keyword phrases.

You will find some keywords and keyword phrases appear on millions of sites while others appear on only a few. If you find keywords and keyword phrases that appear on few other sites yet define your products and services, then you are half way towards success for your ebusiness.

Rank your list of keyword phrases using a mix of least web pages including the phrases and the most searches made on those keywords. A phrase few people include in their searches won't bring many visitors. However, if those keywords define your product very well, you will receive well targeted traffic who will be looking for your site and may well buy from you. If you choose popular phrases your site runs the risk of being lost amongst the masses. Keep experimenting until you are happy that you have found the best keywords and keyword phrases for your ebusiness.

In the above the terms keywords and keyword phrases have been written in bold font to help emphasis the importance of this concept.

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