Friday, September 11, 2009

Part 1.5 Keywords

SIDE-NOTE- Make sure that the list of keywords that you come up with are valid for your site. There is no point in getting the wrong traffic. In other words there is no point in having a visitor who is looking for wrenches come to your web design site. All they will do is see it and click the back button within seconds. Be aware that search engines track the amount of time that visitors stay on your site. They use this as one of their factors in calculating the validity of your site. This is called the "Bounce Rate" and if it is to high then your rankings will be effected.

After you have chosen you keywords it is time to figure out which ones are best to use. Sometimes you have to pick your battles.

OK, now it's time to take your list of keywords to the computer and go to a tool like
google adwords and start trying out your words in the search box. This too will not only tell your how many people are trying to search for this word, but it will also give you ideas for other words or phrases to optimize your site for. Remember that it is common for people to use phrases while searching and often they include a state or city name in this phrase. If you find that your word is only being searched for 2 times a day, then you may want to scrap that word. Especially if what I describe in the next section shows that there are lots of results for that word or phrase.

Next start typing the into various search engines and record the number of results s well at the url's of the organic results that show up on the first and maybe the second pages of the results. If the keyword generates hundreds of thousands or millions of results then you may want to reconsider trying to use that keyword.

After you get all of that done it is time to start researching your competitors. One of the things you do during this process is to find out exactly what percentage of the competitors website is made up of the keyword that you want to optimize. This is called keyword density.


To do this you can go to a free tool like the ones on Seo Chat and type the url of the site you are going to be competing with. This will tell you a little bit of what the spiders and crawlers see when they come to that site. The trick is to then get the content of your page to equal the density (percentage) of the keyword that the competitors site has. For now you can just keep track of all of this information and you will use it when you are considering copy, titles and tags.

Now we are rolling but there is a lot more to do because the almighty algorithms look consider a lot more than just keywords and bounce rates. I will discuss this next week.


Remember also that search engines are just a source of small portion of the traffic that you can get to come to your site.









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