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Search Engine Keyword Selection

By Larry Lang

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 10Oct2007 Word count: 518 Viewed: 397 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination – your website – you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your site. You do this using carefully chosen keywords.

Finding the exact right keywords or phrases can bring hoards of traffic right to your door. But if your keywords are too general or over-used, the possibility of visitors making it to your site decreases dramatically.

You probably think you already know what keywords you should be using. Unfortunately, if you haven't followed specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It's hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network. You need to be able to think like a consumer from the outside looking into your business. Your understanding of your business and your customers' understanding of your business may be significantly different.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will find that the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

To evaluate the effectiveness of your keywords, take into consideration these three elements:

1. popularity
2. specificity
3. motivation

Of these three elements, popularity is the easiest to evaluate. The more hits on a keyword, the more popular it is. So the more popular your keyword is, the more likely that it will be typed into a search engine, which will then bring up your URL.

Popularity isn't enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

The third factor to consider is consumer motivation. Again, this requires you to put yourself in the consumer's position rather than the seller position to determine what prompts the consumer to type specific keywords or phrases into the search engine.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. Evaluating keyword performance across a variety of search engines is essential, because trends change, as does popular language. The most important factor in evaluating the efficiency of a keyword or phrase is to determine which of them not only bring you traffic, but direct customers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work - and it is! But it is work that will ultimately pay off in terms of generating traffic and sales for your business.

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