Developing A Basic Keyword & Positioning Strategy

When you want to find something on the web, chances are good that you start by typing in a keyword or phrase into a search engine. When someone goes looking for products, services, or content like your sites, you want them to see your site at the top of the search results. The way to achieve this is by strategically positioning your site to maximize your search engine ranking on important keywords and phrases.

There are several ways to find your strategic keywords, but there are a few obvious sources. First of all, think of what words you would use to search for your sites content. The next obvious place to look is in the "keywords" META tags and page titles of other web sites. Finally, look at newsgroups, mailing lists, and discussion groups on similar subjects to make sure you havent missed any keywords. Simply browsing the subject lines of a few days worth of newsgroup postings will probably give you all the keywords you need.

You should be warned that nearly every web site operator in your field of interest is trying to maximize their ranking on the most popular keywords. That means that you may not be able to reach anywhere near the top of the list for your most prized keywords. Dont forget, though, that there are many possible variations of keywords, spellings, and wording. For example, besides "web site promotion," there are "web marketing," "internet marketing," "online marketing," etc.

Create a list of strategic keywords for your search engine efforts. Youll have to be prepared to make at least one content page for each keyword or phrase, so that you can get maximum impact. Each of these pages should have the keyword or phrase woven into the:

Title - some sites, believe it or not, dont use their targeted keywords in their page titles. This is critical, so read our article on how to do it right.

META Tags - Some search engines dont read META tags, others place a high priority on them.

Content - this should be obvious, but were constantly surprised to find sites that put keywords in a pages META tags, but not in the content of the page itself.

Hyperlinks - see our article on keyword placement for more details.

Domain Name - dont overlook the power of a good domain name. Registering additional domain names that contain one or more keywords or phrases will do wonders for your search engine rankings. You can register multiple domain names, and have the same site under each domain. You can submit each domain separately for indexing. This is a great strategy for creating successful doorway and bridge pages.

This article has provided you with an overview of keyword strategy. Check the individual articles on each component for more detailed explanations and further tips. The strategy weve described here certainly wont guarantee you top ranking, but it has two major advantages. First, its easy to implement, you just need to keep your keywords in mind as you develop your site. Second, it works! Cultivate enough reciprocal linking relationships, and the result will be a high "link popularity" rating, and your site should soar to the top of the charts. If it doesnt, you probably need to work on more reciprocal links keyword strategy will get your site ready for high rankings, but it wont deliver that result on its own.

About the Author

Dan Thies is the author of "Search Engine Fast Start!", a concise guide to positioning your site with the new breed of search engines. Visit cannedbooks.com

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dan@cannedhelp.com
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