Herrington Web Creations

Establish a good set of meaningful keywords that represent your site correctly.

Ok, now that you have spent a lot of time working on your website, you searched for a good host on the internet, you have put your products online, ready to be sold, you sit there and wonder why don’t you have traffic on your website?

Well, there are a lot of websites on the internet and you should spend some time to work for your site after you have launched it in order to make it known to the internet public. You should follow a few steps that are mandatory. One of the most important steps is to find a valuable set of keywords to represent your website.

For this, first try to put down on a paper what you think that the keywords should be, what you think that your potential visitors would search for on the internet.

Then, ask a bit of help from your friends, ask them to write you down a few words or phrases that they would use to search information that you present on your site. You will actually be impressed by the fact that your keywords will probably not match theirs!!! Yes, you may be a very good developer or manager, but they are the potential clients and…they may think a bit different than you.

That’s’ why it would be useful for you to collaborate with people that are not that familiar with the internet medium, because they would not be constraints by patterns , they would just tell you what exactly they would search for, in a natural language. Then put your words and theirs together and eliminate the duplicates!

One interesting fact is to note if someone misspelled some words, it is perfectly possible, you know, “o” is right near “p” and “I” and it is very easy to make mistakes when typing. So, correct the word, add it, but also add at the end of the list that misspelled word…

Another thing would be to search on the internet for those websites that really stand out the others in the same line of business as yours. Use search engines such as Google or Yahoo! for this and take the first ten for example. Look at their keywords; maybe you realize that some of those keywords would be representative for your website too! In the end it is not unethical; you just keep an eye on your potential “neighbors”. Or if you want, you may say that you just learn from the best!

A very important thing to do: never put keywords on your website if they are not backed up by your website content. Not only that they don’t help, but they may even hurt your positioning in search engine’s result list. That’s why you should provide a good content for your website, rich of keywords and interesting for your visitors!

So, what are keywords anyway? Little wonders if you really want to know. They are as important for the success of your website as the advertising and other promotional means. No keywords, no SERP.

Linking strategy is probably the most important SEO technique, but keywords follow closely. As a mater of fact, you could exchange as many links as you wish, but, without content, your website has no real value. Without keywords your website cannot be found. People use keywords to find information. They type into the search engines’ search bars different words and phrases hoping to find relevant answers. If you want web users to find your website you have to optimize your web pages for the keywords they use.

It’s not enough to write the keywords in your text, or in your keyword META tag. You need to use keywords everywhere: URL, page title, META description, META keywords, page copy, ALT attributes. You also need to think keyword density and where exactly on the page you should place them: headings, subtitles, first paragraph, last sentence, footers and so on. You have to bold some keywords, use others in text links, in lists and so on. Yet, all these aspects are easier than choosing the right keywords.

Choosing the Right Keywords

How difficult can choosing the right keywords be? Well, if you already know what people are looking for, it is not so difficult. However, if you don’t… you have a big problem. The first problem is that you are not going to be able to reach the right segment of your targeted market and the second is that you will fail to deliver the right message to the search engines. As people trust search engine results when they look to buy something online, your only chance to increase online sales is to be have a high ranking in the SERP.

When you choose your keywords you also have to think about high rankings and branding. What you choose has to be directly related to your products and your business name. Your keywords have to describe what you sell or your services. Some SEO experts recommend that you also add common spelling mistakes at your keyword list. I wouldn’t. If you run a serious business you don’t want it associated to any unprofessional artifice. So describe your products honestly, correctly and explicitly.

You’ll have a long list of keywords and phrases to start with. Unfortunately you cannot use all the keywords in a list for your SEO purposes. Choose the most relevant keywords and start from there.

To determine keyword relevancy you could use Wordtracker – a tool used by most of the SEO experts and gurus around the world. The free Overture keyword tool or the keyword generation tool provided by Google AdWords are perfect if you run a pay per click campaign.

Once you have the list of relevant keywords all you need to do is write the content of your website. Remember: relevant keywords bring value to your website, but you shouldn’t overdo it. Your visitors should be able to read your texts without even noticing you are using keywords. Do you think you can master this art? If not, hire a professional writer. Quality has its price.