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SEO Expert
A search engine compares a query term that you submit to the millions of records in its database. The most fundamental elements of any query term are keywords. Keywords are simple terms that are derived directly from a user’s search topic that are used by a search engine to conduct a sorting operation on database records. The most simple query term consists of only one keyword. However, query terms can contain keyword phrases and even sentences. The figure below displays what a simple query term containing two keywords would look like in a keyword phrase.
Selecting Keywords
Keywords are terms or short phrases that describe your company, product(s), or service(s). Targeting keywords are critical to the successful promotion of your website. If you choose the right keywords for your site, you are on your way to Web promotion success. Choosing the wrong keywords, however, could defeat your efforts.
Remember the following points regarding website keywords:
Most people search for word phrases comprised of two or three keywords versus single keywords because they do not want to receive too many irrelevant matches. Do not make the mistake of targeting very general keywords. Typically, these keywords will not make it into a search engine top 10 for your website.
If you pick a keyword phrase that produces 6,548,000 search possibilities, consider some major fine tuning of that phrase. Try to choose keyword/phrases that produce results of approximately 10,000 or fewer hits. Achieve a high ranking in this manner first, then move up to a phrase that produces more hits when you become more proficient at search engine placement.
Choosing the right keyword/phrases for your site doesn’t have to be rocket science. It just takes a little forethought.
How to Select Keywords
Generic Keyword
Keyword Phrase
More Specific
apples
"New York apples"
"Granny Smith apples"
car dealership
"Ford dealership"
"Neptune Ford Dealership"
software
"software sales"
"Quicken software sales"
Write out a short description of your business. Keep what you say focused. Determine your customers demographics (sex, age, income, education, employment, residence, region, hobbies, and recreation).
What do you do? Sell a product or service? Describe such items. Example: you sell accounting software, not just software.
What is your business’s overall objective? How is it unique?
Brainstorm at least 50 keywords and think of as many ways as possible to describe your business and its products. Use two or three word phrases instead of single words.
Include more specific brand names if you sell these products. Legally, you need to put the reserved symbol or trademark symbol after the names when you do mention them on your page.
Your name: Unless you are a well known company/organization, it is generally less important to emphasize your name as a keyword.
Do not pick too obscure a keyword phrase, or one that very few people would be searching for. You maybe in the top ten but no one will find you anyway.
Remember a lot of these words can be put in a keyword power combinations. Review your list and sort your keywords by descending order of importance. Do a search on the different search engines and search on these combinations of words. Try combining just two words, then try three-word phrases. These are called "commanding combinations". It will do two things for you: 1) provide combinations which will be searched by customers. 2) offer exclusive combinations which will return only a few listings but will target your prospects.
Use Quotes
Put "quotes" around your phrase. Many people will use multiple word phrases to find products and services. The results can change considerably. The results can change considerably. If you search for "Ford dealership" without quotes, you'll find 29,000+ results. With quotation marks, you'll find only 6,000+. This is because with most of the search engines, putting quotes around the term tells the engine that you are interested in that exact term, not in each individual words in the keyword/phrase. Without the quotes you are telling the search engine to look for each individual word as well as the phrase and this can return results much larger and less relevant. You may want to consider in placing your phrase in quotes somewhere in the body text.
Use Misspelled Keywords
Think of how many people misspell words on a daily (or hourly) basis, and capitalize on those errors. If some of your keywords or phrases are typically misspelled, include them also. If you include the misspelled versions, you may also capture the Web traffic of the bad spellers.
Use Regional Keywords
Are you offering regional services or products? If so, capitalize on this. Many search engine users fine-tune searches by using regional keyword phrases, such as "Maine recipes" or "New England recipes" versus simply using the keyword "recipes." If searching for information regarding the purchase of a Ford automobile, a user may query "Neptune Ford" instead of simply "Ford." More examples are shown in
Keyword / Keyword Phrase
Regional Keyword Phrase
"auto supply"
"Belmar auto supply"
"real estate"
"Spring Lake real estate"
"Ford dealership"
"Red Bank Ford dealership"
Take Advantage of Word Stemming
Some search engines use word stemming, a process in which the engine searches for root words that also include variations of that term. You should utilize this process by using longer forms of your keywords whenever possible.
For example, use "teacher" and "teaching" instead of "teach." Another suggestion is to simply add an "s" to each of your keywords.
When writing your text be sure to include all variations of the keyword for the search engines that do not recognize word stemming.
Case-sensitive keywords
Viewers usually search using all lowercase letters, if they are looking for "New Jersey," they'll type in "new jersey." Be sure that you put proper nouns in lowercase. AltaVista and some other search engines are case-sensitive or partially case sensitive, meaning that they will need keywords with their first letter in capital, "New Jersey" or even in all uppercase, "NEW JERSEY."
When using trademark terms, don't forget the generic name. There have been lawsuits involving words that are commonly used such as "Kleenex" -- the generic name would be "tissue."
Avoid Kill Terms
Kill terms (also called stop words) are very common words that are usually ignored by search engines, such as conjunctions and prepositions. You should avoid the use of kill terms in your keyword phrases.
a
an
and
at
by
for
in
it
of
that
the
to
too
Web
with
This is not a full list.
Search engines ignore kill terms (there is variance among search engines) as a strategy to save storage space and speed searches. Time is saved when the search engine excludes searching for certain small words (meaning it will not "stop" to find them).
Remember the following points regarding kill terms in your Web pages:
if your site contains kill terms in areas where a search engine spider looks for information to index, it will ignore the kill terms, possibly affecting how you are indexed.
if the prominence of a particular keyword in your title is crucial for a particular engine’s ranking scheme, having "the" as the first word in your title could damage your ranking.
if a stop word is part of your site name or title, put it in quotes or devise another name that does not include the stop word.
if you are not sure your word is a stop word, do a search, and if you come up with a statement such as "No document matches your query," you will know that word is a stop word. Each search engine will have their own list so check each one.
Exercise: Writing & Testing Keywords
Track everything you do in your efforts to boost your search engine rankings with a notebook or log file on your PC. Document everything as you proceed so you can determine what works and what does not. Fine-tune your steps and try again.
Your ranking within a search engine may suddenly move up or down; you should understand why. If your rank decreases after submitting a revision, you can analyze your actions to determine why the previous submission produced better results.
You may research words for five different search engines. Put in the keyword "real estate" and see the different terms that people search on. This is a great tool to work with. Now put your keywords in and obtain a listing for a keyword/phrase, from the most popular query to the least popular. Some keywords may not be relevant, but it will help you to brainstorm. You will find other handy tools there also to use.
Another great place for looking up keywords: Word Tracker they have a database of over 40 million results that is updated every 2 hours. Enter a phrase that describes your business or service, and you'll see how many people are actually searching for that keyword.
Describe your business in detail for your own benefit. If you do not have a business, fabricate one, or describe what you are trying to do with your website. Seeing this description in writing may help you discover aspects of your business that you might have otherwise overlooked or not included in your promotion strategy.
Visit the AltaVista (http://altavista.com/) search engine or Google (http://google.com/) and search for your top keywords and keyword combinations. Look for power combos--those specific keyword combinations that return a limited set of websites when searched.
How many websites/Web pages did you find for your top five keywords?
Remember that you may not want to pick a keyword or keyword combination that has a large number of Web pages competing for the top ten positions. Instead, you may choose to pick keywords/combinations where you would have a fighting chance of succeeding to the top.
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