Thursday, September 21, 2006
Finding Keywords
Focusing a Keyword:
When people tell you to target the word "free" they are out of their minds. The single word is too general and has too much competition. I just did a search on google for "free" and it returned 5,080,000,000 results.
I am not saying that free should not be on your page, it is on most of mine. I am saying that keywords should define the product or idea. Free alone just does not get this done.
There are many different ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are:
• Words people would search for to find your product
• Data mine your site level search information if you have a site level search product.
• Problems your prospective customers may be trying to solve with your product or service (even if they do not know you exist)
• Keyword tags on competitors websites
• Visible page copy on competitors websites
• Related search suggestions on large search engines (such as Teoma or Yahoo!)
• Related term suggestion at smaller engines such as Gigablast, Vivisimo, Become.com and Snap
• Keyword groupings via tools such as Google Sets
• Lexical FreeNet – helps find related terms and ideas.
• Tag Cloud – free Folksonomy tool showing related terms. If your product name or brand are related to other common terms in your market, then you are doing a good job working your brand into the semantic language.
• Keyword suggestion tools (which are covered in the next section
Keyword Selection Tips:
The goal of keywords is to choose terms that will bring well targeted traffic to your web site. Each page on your site can be targeted for a few different keyword phrases. Typically I like to just do about 1 to 2 primary and 2 to 3 secondary phrases.
Single word keywords are usually not well targeted and hard to obtain.
Longer keywords are easier to rank well for and typically have better conversion rates.
Tagged: blog statistic, Google, google analytics, SEO.
