In the previous post, I talked about how search engine technology works to place a website on their index. In this post, I will talk about keywords and their relation to your success.
What are keywords?
Keywords are descriptive words (usually one to two word phrases are okay) that tell the search engines in general, what your website is about. The reason I say that keyword are the key to your web success is because keywords play a major part in how high up in the search engines you go. They better you are at choosing the right keywords, the more successful you are at getting into the right search path and in front of the right customers. The more relavent customers see you on the search engines because of your keywords, the better your success in driving them to your website.
Your success depends on keywords.
Let’s look at an example…
Type into your browser, http://www.officedepot.com
Now after the site loads, go to the “view”menu in your browser and select the option to view the page source. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the source code of a website, it’s very easy to decipher. When the source code shows up you should see several things encoded in “meta” tags. The part that I want you to focus on right now is the tags that start with “meta”. Meta tags are hidden pieces of code that don’t show in the design view of your website, but are very instrumental in helping you in the search engines. Now as of the date of this writing, the tag is clearly visible on the Office Depot code. You can see them several lines down.
So, now let’s help you get off the ground. There are a lot of programs out there that I have used to help you choose the right keywords and optimize your site. Whichever you choose, they are a great asset to the modern webmaster because they provide a lot of information in a very short period of time without a lot of legwork on your part. I personally prefer one called Web ceo. It soars above the rest and I think you’ll agree when you use it. They offer both a free package and an upgraded package for all types of webmasters to use, but in my opinion, it’s easier to purchace one of the full packages because it includes everything you will ever need to make your website fully optimized. Make sure you use the access link provided in this post, it goes directly to their product.
Even if you don’t download the program, these steps are very simple to do, they just take a bit longer and require the use of multiple search engines.
First, take out a sheet of paper or open up your word processor program (ie. Microsoft Word) and write out what it is that your website does. The easiest way for you to focus on your keywords is to write out what it is that you do through the site itself. You can even go to your site and pull some quotes. Good keywords can come out of your best marketing and sales information.
From these phrases or quotes, pick out a few words that really hit the heart of what you do. For instance, if you say, “I help people spend less time worrying about where to find office and school supplies”, your keywords would be similar to those of the Office Depot website that we looked at earlier (office supplies, business supplies, school supplies, furniture). It may take you a little time to come up with these words and I don’t want you to limit yourself by the number of words.
Next, open up the Web ceo program. One of the first things you do when running this program is to establish a project. You can do this by simply selecting “add new site”. This is simpler if you have a website already established, but not impossible if you are still working on your site. Follow the onscreen directions and after you’re done and you have returned to the main menu, select “research keywords”.
This interface is ideal because it provides a lot of information in a very short amount of time. Select your project and enter your first keyword into the box provided and hit “enter”. The program will provide you instantly with the number of daily search requests for that term, the actual competition from the search engines, and a number they like to call the “keyword efficiency index” which is very helpful in narrowing down your list. The best thing about this is that the information provided in this program is updated and you get those updates whether you upgrade or not.
When the first result comes back, go to the second pane and create a new basket so that you can compare the results side by side. Manually enter in all of your keywords and one by one add them to the basket. When you are done, depending on how many keywords you have, select those with the highest ranks (as shown by the KEI column) and write them down. It certainly is okay to include some of the others in your site, but remember that you may not have as much luck with it was with those of higher ranking.
If you have a web design software and can gain access to the code of that software open your website. If you can’t, or have a web designer that handles all of that, get in contact with them and have them add the keywords to your website. They should know how to do this for you.
If you own your own website and have access to the code for alterations here is what you do. If you look at your code you should see two tags labeled “head” These are similar to the beginning and end tags for the head of your website where your metatags and title will eventually be.
Copy and paste the keywords “meta” from the Office Depot source code into your code between the “head” tags:
This is obviously a copy of what was on the Office Depot website, but when you have it copied onto your site, remove their keywords listed and replace them with yours (each keyword seperated by a comma). Once you are done, save the page and upload it if you have to to make it live. Nothing significant has been changed to the content to your site, it has just been enhanced to make it more search engine friendly.
When you are done, go back to each one of the pages in your site, and repeat the process again. The only difference is that each page needs to be geared toward the content that is on that particular page. For example, if one page is about staplers, the keywords need to be geared toward staplers. If one is about office chairs, the keywords need to be geared toward that and so on.
I hope this helps. In my next post, I’ll talk to you about the title and description of your website.
Good Luck
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