Choosing Keyword Phrases

Choosing Keyword Phrases

"Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain."

Brent Winters, President
FirstPlace Software, Inc.

One of the most important phases of web site design (and we consider it often the most important) is choosing the right keyword phrases for your page(s). If you don't have the right keyword phrases, nothing else will make any difference, because everything else builds on using the right keyword phrases. It really doesn't matter if you have the most beautiful Web site in the world with animation, loads of free stuff, call to action and everything else; for most sites some 85% of the people that come to your site will try to find you by using the search engines. If you don't have the right keyword phrase used in the design and aren't using it properly, there won't be much traffic. The second most important phase in the design is selecting the title and description using that keyword phrase in such a way that people desire to click through from the search engine (which shows only those two things) to your site. The most common mistakes in Web design involve choosing the wrong keyword phrases and not using them correctly in your page design, particularly in the title.

The indexing in the search engines is primarily based on certain keyword phrases used on your page. Pages are indexed - not sites - based on how you use these phrases in page design and linking.

For the moment, let's look at two important definitions. These definitions vary with the SEO, but for our purpose here:

Keyword - words used to clarify what a web page is all about. If you are selling a farm, for example, you might use the keywords "farm", "for sale" and "Portland." The words are generic. Trying to use them to describe your web page to a search engine would get a searcher using any one of these keywords a large number of returns, and make it nearly impossible for you to get you a good position listing with the keyword. Searching on farm or for sale or even farm +"for sale" will return over two million items in Google.

Keyword Phrase - a short phrase of three to five keywords that uniquely describes a web page as much as possible. For example, "Portland farm for sale." What you enter to the search engines should have these quotes for an exact match on the phrase. The goal: You want a keyword phrase that is used often in searching with very few competing web sites. I get seven items returned here. Unfortunately, no one has searched using this keyword phrase recently. (Our book shows you how to determine this.) Unless you are aiming for a really small niche market, this phrase won't have much value. The actual length of the phrase varies with the topic.

When you design a web page, you design to specific keyword phrases. The search engines, however, indexes on all the meaningful keywords and keyword phrases it can find on the page. It doesn't know what you choose for that keyword phrase. You will generally only see good ranking, however, only on the keyword phrases you used in the design. This keyword phrase affects how the search engines ranks your page both in how the phrase is used in design and linking.

This means choosing the keyword phrases is very important!

The two magic works here in choosing your keyword phases are supply and demand. Supply refers to the competition for a keyword phrase. Simply searching in Google, Yahoo, or MSN will tell you how many web pages are competing for your keyword phrases. Demand is defined by how many people are searching on your keyword phrase each day, week, or month. There are a few free tools out there that can help here; but there is at least one major commercial tool that is inexpensive to use and gives you an objective analysis on choosing the right keyword phrases. Our book goes a step beyond this, pointing to the tools but also showing you some very important methods of even moving beyond those commercial tools.

See Carl's book on Web Site Promotion and Search Engine Positioning for more...

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