How to Use Keywords to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines Part 1

You have designed a beautiful web site and published it for the world to see and visit. You wait patiently, however there is either a trickle or no visitors at all and therefore no sales.

You may be 1 of 4 web site owners that has not optimized your site with keywords for ranking in the search engines. You say you have inserted keywords in your site, but are they targeted keywords?

My last article discussed “How to Use Meta Tags for Search Engine Optimization” (www.isitebuild.com/metatags). Let’s take a deeper look at how to use keywords to optimize your site.

What is a Keyword?
These are words or phrases which people would insert in a search engine to look for information contained in your site. The search engine spiders take those words and
display the best sites that relate to that information. Depending on the popularity of the word, you may have a million or more web sites to choose from.

Ideally your web site should appear in the top 20-30 sites displayed, to be included in the persons search. This would result in a continuous stream of visitors.

Targeting the Best Keywords
If your keywords are not tightly targeted to your site, you will dim your chances of being highly ranked in the search engines. Here’s what to do:

Go to the overture suggestion tool
(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion) or wordtacker (http://www.wordtracker.com) and insert a word or phrase that one would search on for information on your site.

Create a table (in MS Excel or MS Word) with 4 columns.

Insert 200-300 words or phrases in the first column from the results of your suggestion tool.

Use the second column to record the popularity of each word beside each word in the first column.

The third column is to determine the competing sites for the words you have listed above. Do a search on a few of the most popular search engines (is Yahoo.com, Google.com) for the words or phrases you have listed above. (i.e. if you do a search on Google.com for “Internet Marketing”, your reply will be: “Results 1 - 10 of about 3,280,000”). Enter this number in the third column for each searched word to determine its popularity.

In the fourth column you can enter the results of the other 3 columns. Mark the words in this column that have a high number of searches but have low competition. Utilize these keywords or phrases in your site, so you won’t have to compete with the
millions of other web pages.

Now you have a list of targeted keywords or phrases that you can incorporate in your web site. Not all search engines use keywords to rank your site, however you have increased your chances for those that do. Doing keyword research can lead to a
continuous flow of visitors to your site, and ultimately more sales.

Part 2 of this article will discuss where to strategically place keywords on your site, how many keywords to use and what mistakes you should avoid.

Copyright 2002 Herman Drost

About the author.

Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of iSiteBuild.com Site Design and Low Cost Hosting from $30/year.

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