Keywords are the words and phrases that web surfers use in search engines when they search for web sites that sell certain products or services, or relate to particular topics.
Right selection of the keywords can help build your business and optimise your web site so that it turns up close to the top of the search engine results pages. Thus, it involves making a list of keywords that can drive Targeted traffic to your site and are commonly searched for.
Here are some techniques that will help you to determine what keywords and phrases you should select, if possible before building your site.
1. You must make a list of keywords or search words and phrases that your prospective customers might use when they look for your product or service. Make sure that you include similar words as well as common misspellings.
2. When selecting keywords, try not to limit yourself to single words. Remember that the majority of people search using multiple words that consist of two or more words so as to get more targeted results.
3. Search these keywords in order to find your competitors on the major search engines. Also, review the competitors’ web sites for the keywords they are using.
4. If you have site with web analytics software then check the keywords that surfers make use of to view your web site.
5. You may visit Wordtracker web site. This site will help you select the appropriate keywords and key phrases. Wordtracker brings together a database of words and phrases that are usually searched by the people.
6. You can also use Yahoo’s search term suggestion tool or Google’s key word suggestion tool to determine a list of keywords to use on your web site.
Once you have the list of keywords, you need to priorities them. Check which are the most important ones? Make sure that you use these keywords in the web page content, file names, internal hyperlinks, and the like.