SEO-MANIA, Keyword Selection
SEO-MANIA Keyword Selection - how to choose the keywords that bring the most targeted web traffic?
SEO MANIAC's will soon realize that keyword selection is probably one of the most important steps in your SEO campaign. If you optimize your page for the wrong keywords, (ie. keywords that are seldom used by your prospective customers to search for what you are offering) your hard work will be in vain!
You certainly want to select the keywords that are most frequently used by your prospective customers to locate a website such as yours when they use a search engine.
So how do you find the "right keywords"?
Currently, my favourite place to find keyword statistics is Overture's "Search Term Suggestion Tool". This free tool allows you to enter a keyword and shows you the number of searches performed for various combinations of that keyword. Whilst its not as in depth as WordTracker (another keyword data service) it's free and will give you a reasonably accurate description of what words people are using in their search engine queries. You can find the Overture tool here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Once you've found some popular and related keywords, its a good idea to see what kind of competition there is for each of these words. By competition, I mean how many results are returned by the search engines when you do a search for a particular keyword or phrase. In most cases, it will be easier to score a top rank for a keyword or phrase that has little competition. For those of you tha have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, just go to www.google.com, type in a keyword and then look for the sentence on the top of the results page that says something like "Results 1 - 100 of about 3,030,000" (that's the number of results returned for "SEO" today - 2003/11/30).
Are you starting to understand? So if you have a german shepherd dog breeder, rather than just optimize for the keywords "dog breeder", you might also aim for "german shepherd dog breeder", and be the leader in a smaller but highly targeted category. Ok, I think that's enough for now about keyword selection, just remember wrong keyword = poor results!
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