Research

Keywords and Keyword phrases

We said in other articles that great content is the most important thing to raise your website’s visibility. Well, keywords are the other most important thing. Don’t skip this part.

You need to select a few effective keywords to include in the visible text and parts of the code of your web pages.

Make a List

Make a list of words you would use to describe your product or service to someone who doesn’t know anything about them.

• For each word, consider whether the singular or plural form is more common. (Usually, plural gives you better chances.)
• Type your words in lowercase.
• Combine the words in your list to build phrases:
  painless dentistry, happy drilling, automatic spanking machine.
• Target longer phrases. The most effective queries contain 3-5 words, as those who perform longer searches are more aware of what they want and more likely to become customers:
  residential environmental damage assessment reports, imaging diagnostic techniques.
• Eliminate “filter words” (a, an, the, and, or, for, not) from your keyword phrases. Search engines will discard them.
• Less is more. Your final keyword list should contain no more than ten words (more, and you'll dilute their effectiveness.)
• Forget about misspelled words, unless you are talking about “otolaryngology”. Quite a few people are fond of including misspelled keywords in Meta tags, but the importance of a keyword to search engines is minimal if that word is not repeated in the Title tag or in the visible body text. And you are not going to sprinkle typos all over your pages, are you?
• Consider including one of the least common words in your keyword list. It might help you corner a smaller market.

Now you have a long list of keywords and keyword phrases that needs editing. You have to figure out what to cut, add, replace, tweak, so that you are left with the most effective keyword combinations for your website.
Did I say website? Wait… You don’t want to treat your whole site as one big lump. You will get better results by targeting keywords that are specific to the page, not the whole site.

Edit your List

To edit your keyword list:

• draw on your knowledge of your business and clients;
• use online tools that:
  - show you who you are competing with,
  - show you how people search, and
  - make keyword suggestions.

Run your keywords and phrases on your target search engines, for example:
- www.google.com
- www.yahoo.com
- www.ask.com
- www.teoma.com

Since Google and Yahoo! power a large number of sites besides their own, it is perfectly reasonable to only target just one or both of them. If your business is in an industry that has a specialty search engine, target that first.

For each word or phrase, record how your site is ranked. While you’re there, check your competitors’ rankings, too. That gives you a useful benchmark.

Now that you know where you stand, find out what words people use in trying to find your product or service. See how keywords are used in online searches at the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool and the Google Keyword Sandbox.

See how directories list products and services like yours. You might get an idea or two from the way they set up their categories and subcategories.

Still unsure of how to apply these advice to your business?

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