Elementary Guide to Keyword Selection
Monday, March 1st, 2010Effective Keyword selection is essential to attracting customers and internet web traffic to the business website. Identifying a good, short term or phrase that properly describes the business, the product or the service though can be a challenging task. Keyword selection must characterize the page content though if the search engines are understand what the page is about.
At start up, most enterprises don’t invest time in researching what keywords would work for the organization. That or the process is simply not accomplished. As keywords help search engines to understand the content of your page though, ignoring keyword selection may mean turning away visitors and customers from your business website.
But what really are ‘keywords?’ The keyword list is found in a section of the webpage that the viewer doesn’t generally see. The ‘keyword metatags’ provide words and phrases to the search engines that describe what your page is about. Readers can’t see the meta tags unless they look at the page source code.
More importantly though, keywords describe your business, the web page and should be used throughout the page. Keyword phrases that appear frequently provide confirmation to Google and others that the page is in fact about what the keywords describe.
Keyword phrases, once identified, should be used in the page title, page headlines and reasonably placed throughout the text. Overuse of keywords is awkward and counter-productive as the search engines may see this as something they term ‘keyword stuffing.’ Pages they believe are overstuffed with keywords are devalued in the search engine algorithms or simply de-indexed.
There are many processes for selecting appropriate keywords. Google offers a tool that will read an already constructed page and offer ideas of what keywords might be appropriate for it. (This tool is part of the Google Adwords tool suite.) This tool is useful when one is unsure where to start in the keyword selection process. There are however, some things to avoid.
Avoid keywords that have a great deal of competition in Google Adwords. The same Adwords tool will display how much competition there is for a keyword or keyword phrase. Although not universally true, these keywords take longer to compete for and to rank well – especially for newer pages.
When you believe you may have discovered a good keyword phrase, run a Google search. If major corporate websites appear at the top of the results page, reconsider your choice. If your company page would be up against someone like Bank of America for your keyword term, rest assured that they will ruthlessly compete against anyone using that term – which decreases your opportunity to rank well. (There is a way to compete with the big guys just not head-to-head using their keywords. See the note on including a geographic term below.)
Choosing effective keywords and phrases then is an art form that identifies a creative and descriptive phrase that describes your page as well as your business. The other part of the art is to identify one of these terms that generates traffic but has fewer big companies competing for it. A good and efficient keyword phrase then is one that has a good amount of internet traffic but isn’t heavily competed for.
A quick note is appropriate here about traffic number that the Google Adwords tool displays. These are not exact counts, but are useful for providing a relative measure of the level of search activity that a keyword term receives.
One of the biggest allies you have in the selection process is creativity. Including things like geographic terms or city names in the keyword string help set your page apart from those of major corporations. Local customers in need of services generally include a geographic parameter within the search, such as ‘Banks in Birmingham.’ This is much more descriptive than simply searching for ‘banks.’ Big corporations generally compete very poorly on a local level for business traffic, so this could be an opportunity for a local business to elbow its way into the local market for providing goods and services.
Flexibility and willingness to try new phrases are important in keyword selection. Terms that may look great during the research phase may turn out to be total duds. Buyer behavior can be a scientific study that borders on the bizarre, so don’t be surprised if your great keyword term generates little traffic. There exist no rules for consumer behavior and logic frequently seems to be defied. Trial, error (and trial and error) may be necessary to identify the proper set of keywords that attract traffic and business to your web page. Still, when a business is in the start up phase or pre-growth stage, what better time would there be to find the right set of keywords that work for your company.
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