webspinners - information - picking keywords

Online Advertising Information.

Pick keywords that generate qualified website visitors 24 hours a day 365 days a year.

By Anthony S. Blair

There are several things to consider when choosing keywords and phrases. The most important is to put yourself in the shoes of the type of visitor you want to attract. Make a list of what kind of keywords or phrases they are likely to search on. This requires you to separate yourself from your product, service or web site and think like the average Joe who might want to find you, but knows nothing about your site.

It's a good idea to ask friends or co-workers what they might type in to find your site, or even have them go to a search engine and tell them to try and find information on the topic your site happens to cover. Watch what words and phrases they use.

Important things you want to remember when picking keywords to target:

1. CONCEPTS: Include concept keywords such as "accounting software" if that's what you sell, but also try and be specific enough so that it's not too broad.

2. BRANDS: Include more specific brand names such as Quicken. If you offer services, then try to use service brand names when possible. Legally, you should put the ® reserved symbol or ™ trademark symbol after the names when mentioning them on the page.

3. COMPANY NAMES: If you offer products from a well-known company, include that company's name in your keywords.

4. YOUR NAME: Unless you are a well known company/organization such as Microsoft or Hewlett Packard, it's generally less important to emphasize your name as a keyword. You should, however, setup an "About My Company/Organization" page that does repeat your name many times so that someone searching for you will find that page.

5. COMMON WORDS: There are now so many pages and words indexed on the Web, that a search on many common words such as "software" or "Internet" are going to be completely ignored for that search by the engine! Therefore, most people have to search on two or three word phrases to find what they're looking for. Trying to be listed well on every phrase/keyword combination they might search for is next to impossible.

6. TEST KEYWORDS: Ideally, before you even start a new Internet Web site (or even after), you should see how many other pages match the keywords people would likely search on to find you. Your keywords may only bring up a lot of garbage that your potential audience would have no interest in anyway. Therefore, with the proper strategy, you could be the only site of your type that appears near the top of that search.

7. PHRASES: As mentioned, many people will likely use multiple-word phrases to find you--particularly when single words do not provide adequate scope for the search. The syntax for this varies by engine, but phrases are generally searched for surrounded by quotes. Therefore, make a list of 2-3 word phrases people are likely to search for.

8. CASE-SENSITIVITY: If the user types the word Baseball then most engines will search for "Baseball" with an uppercase "B" ONLY. If your page has only "baseball" in it, you'll not be found! On the other hand, if they search for "baseball" and your page has "Baseball" on it, most engines default to finding words of any case when the keyword used was in all lower case. Therefore, it pays to make sure you have at least some of the keywords in uppercase or starting with an uppercase letter if the user might search that way.

9. BAD SPELLING CAN BE GOOD: Search engines don't have spell checkers. Also, product names can have slight variations. For example, MicroLogic has a product called Info Select. However, people could easily search on MicroLogic, Micro Logic, Infoselect, or Info Select. Look for obvious mistakes people are likely to make and then incorporate some of them into one of your pages in some way to pick up traffic you'd otherwise miss.