Choosing Keywords
To get plenty of visitors to your website you need to be choosing keywords that are in demand but ideally are short on supply. By choosing keywords that are regularly searched for where few webpages feature these keywords, your pages should get high search engine ranking and subsequent traffic.
Some of the best tools for choosing keywords are:
- Wordtracker - find keywords and phrases.
- Overture search term suggestion tool
- The Lycos top 50 search terms
- Lycos suggests other search terms - Example search with the keyword "cake".
Wordtracker lets you enter a keyword and gives you suggestions for related words that people search for. Next you choose your keywords and it gives you a list of the search terms and traffic for the phrases based on those keywords. Wordtracker also publishes a list of the top keywords each month.
Once you have a selection of keywords (or more likely phrases) you can conduct searches on the web to find where there is a lack of pages targeting particular keywords.
Placing Keywords
It's a competitive world out there with millions of web sites battling for top ranking in the search results. Placing keywords stategically within your website is vital for success. However, many webmasters don't bother or don't know how.
A good website will contain many inter-linked pages of useful content. Each webpage will be focussed on key words and phrases on a particular topic relevant to the overall theme of the site.
Based on the theme of your web site, do some research to identify keywords and phrases that you will focus on.
Use the key phrase as the page name, title and heading.
In the body of the web page you should aim for around 250 words of text. Try not to overuse your keywords otherwise it'll be considered spam and penalised accordingly!
Placing Keywords in Meta Tags
The "keywords" meta tag used to be important but nowadays the search engines tend to analyse the content of your site and often ignore this meta tag.
The meta tags go between the "head" tags of your html code. Here's the format:
<head>
<title>Key Phrase</title>
<meta name="description" content="Description
of the web page">
<meta name="keywords" content="Key words and
phrases">
</head>
Seperate the keywords and phrases like this: phrase1, phrase2
Misc Optimization Tips
- Links to your web site from other quality sites will help your search engine ranking.
- Using keywords of the linked-to page in hypertext links helps show relevance.
- Use keywords in image "alt" tags.
- Get your website listed in human-edited directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ.
- Avoid too much HTML above your keywords and contents.
- Get your own hosted domain name, don't use URL forwarding.
- Avoid splash pages, flash and frames.
Download the WordTracker Keyword Research Guide: Learn the strategies used by top SEO experts.
