Selecting The Best Terms To Steer Traffic To Your Site
If you're like everyone else who owns a website, you desire your site to emerge in the top 10 of Google search results. Regrettably, most people don't have the knowledge to actually achieve this goal. There are many steps to take in order to be found for terms related to your site. Moreover, taking your time to investigate the best possible keywords for your site is an important step on the ladder.
Many webmasters make the slip-up of assuming that a ranking for one generic term related to their website will turn their site into a profitable success. Ranking well for one generic term could provide a fine stream of traffic and brand appreciation, this does not mean the visitors to your site will be targeted traffic that will make purchases or even sign up for your newsletter. Not only that, but the expenses of targeting that generic keyword will likely tower over your return on investment. You should target various terms associated with your product's benefits or the difficulties your product solves. Such terms will not only drive traffic, but also lead to that all important conversion.
Your first goal is to consider who your prospects are and the reasons why they will visit your website. Do you advertise products online? Do you offer services? Is your site more content focused? Who would benefit and why would they benefit from your website? Once you understand your potential visitors and why they will visit you will be able to select better keywords to concentrate on.
With that as a goal, you can now think about the benefit or problem related keywords that you think people will use to try and find your site. You shouldn’t be satisfied with just a single keyword. This is a trap that lots of webmasters fall into as they assume that a single keyword will provide enough traffic to maintain their business. And they are taken aback that their business doesn’t improve if they do achieve that ranking. Think about all of the promising phrases and themes of your web site, even use a thesaurus to locate related terms. You can also check rival websites for ideas. It can be surprising just what words and phrases your prospective visitors will be using!
After having developed the list of keywords, you need to use some resources to determine how widely used and competitive those terms are. Also, you'll start to sharpen up those terms to be more targeted to your website’s purpose.
To start out you'll research how widely used your keywords are. This step can be performed using various keyword suggestion tools.
Keyword suggestion tools tell you which keywords were typed into searches, and how many searches were performed using those terms. Entering a phrase in the resource will return a collection of other words and phrases that contain your keyword, alternative suggestions with a similar theme and also an estimation of the magnitude of traffic each phrase garners per month. These resources can be inconsistent as they query different search engines and the traffic estimations can be inaccurate, but they are still helpful for trying to get a ball park estimation of the amount of searches performed, and for suggesting various keywords you might never have considered targeting.
Google's AdWords Keyword Tool, located at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is an excellent tool and gives you a list of suggested terms as well as the quantity of searches conducted on Google.
A similar tool is located at http://www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the metacrawlers Dogpile and Metacrawler. So the figures may not be illustrative of what is being searched on the web as a whole. But Wordtracker is still beneficial for suggesting alternative phrases and associated keywords. Wordtracker is not a free resource. Wordtracker offers monthly or yearly subscriptions.
Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com is a relative newcomer to the keyword suggestion market. KeywordDiscovery can query over 200 search engines world wide and provides similar results to Wordtracker as well as other tools, but with prices starting at $69.95 per month. You can evaluate this service for free but you'll receive only a sample of the results you would receive as a paid member.
Next, you'll need to find out how competitive your keywords are. Ideally you want to find terms that have high volume traffic but a small number of websites contending to rank for that keyword. You can use various tricks to determine this. Competitive pages that are optimized for an expression will surely have that term in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site. So by going to Google and using the queries intitle:“phrase here” and inanchor:“phrase here”, you can figure out the number of other pages that have been optimized for your preferred phrase. The lower the results for these searches, the less competitive the term is. For more content about what these Google advanced search operators do, go to http://google.about.com/od/googlepowersearches/Google_Power_Searches.htm.
After using these resources you'll have a list of keywords that are much more targeted than your original keywords. These phrases can include breaking your term down by regional location, or a precise product. You can now optimize your web site for multiple phrases – remember that search engines index web pages and not simply websites. The result is that all of the pages in your website can be found in search engines, and this means that all of those pages can be optimized for distinctive keywords!
Many people are also optimizing pages for "long tail" keyword phrases. These are obscure multi word phrases that are only searched a couple of times, but are so precise they can wind up being very targeted terms and carry with them higher conversion rates. In order to include long tails phrases you must have a information rich site – the more content you have the more likely you are to be picked up for very specific phrases that can be found somewhere on your site.
As a result you should now at last have a list of the most desired targeted phrases for your site! It should be clear now that the method of selecting your words and phrases isn’t something that can be considered quickly. There is considerable preparation to complete if you want to optimize the capability of your website to draw natural search traffic. With your final list you are now ready to optimize your pages to be found for those keywords, but that is a further subject.
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