However, dynamic keyword insertion is not for every situation.  You must be careful not to over use or abuse it.  The following problems can arise when using dynamic keyword insertion.

1) Dynamic Keyword Insertion doesn’t increase the revelancy of your ad.
Adwords likes to see the keyword you are targeting in the headline or ad description.  It will increase your quality score if the keyword is part of the ad.  However, it doesn’t consider dynamic keyword insertion to be the keyword.  So you miss an opportunity to improve your quality score.

2) Dynamic Keyword Insertion can lead to poorly written ads.
You’ve seen ads that don’t seem to make sense when your read them.  You can be sure that such ads are using dynamic keyword insertion and that accounts for the poor sales copy.  When you use a large keyword list, it’s practically impossible to write a single ad that will make sense and be compelling.

3) Dynamic Keyword Insertion can’t help your landing page.
You may have read that your landing page can benefit from dynamic keyword insertion.  It can’t.  Your landing page is outside Adwords.  Dynamic keyword insertion only occurs within adwords.  Want proof?  Stick the token {KeyWord} on your landing page and view it a browser.  The token will not be replaced.

4) Dynamic Kewyord Insertion may make it difficult to track ad performance
Split testing your ads and sales copy is a proven method to improve your ads.  However since you won’t know exactly what you ad said at any given time, it makes if difficult to test changes to your sales copy.

You must be aware of the advantages and drawbacks before you use dynamic keyword insertion.  You must then make an informed decision if it is right for your situation.  You are generally better off without it if you customize your ads and landing pages.

However only getting top SERP’s should not be the final destination for you. As a smart e-business owner, you need to ensure that you are getting top placement in major search engines for right keyword. Yes, right keywords are the first thing that is necessary to drive organic traffic towards your website. Without selection of right keywords, you cannot expect your online sales to rise.

Proper keyword analysis is the key to success in search engine marketing. You need to analyze your business carefully and prepare keyword analysis report. You can also ask your friends or peers that, what would be their preferred search terms when they need to find out a product or service matching to your targeted business domain. The final selection of keywords should be a perfect blend of both your researched terms as well as suggested search terms by your friends.

However, importance of keyword research tools cannot be underestimated if you are serious about driving sales to your website. Effective use of keyword research or suggestion tools like Google Keywords Suggestion Tool, Overture.com, WorkTracker, and Keywordspy can make a significant change in your SERP’s as well as incoming sales to your website.

You are investing your hard-earned money and honest efforts to boost your business and sales. So, keep the set of most beneficial keywords relevant to your business ready before putting more money on stake in PPC, Adwords and other contextual advertising. You should also figure out the keyword selection strategy of your top competitors in advance, so that you can make your search engine marketing plans accordingly.

Keywords Research or suggestion tools do much of your homework quickly. They will not only show you the most relevant keywords to boost your sales, but also show you the volume of search for those keywords in all major search engines. Some advance keyword tools like Keywordspy can help you multi-dimensionally. Keywordspy can help you in researching your competitor’s keywords and search engine marketing strategies, as well as provide you real time tracking of your competitors in major search engines across a wide geographical area.

In brief, to get enough sales continuously through your search engine marketing campaign, you need to give a close attention to importance of right keywords research and suggestion tools. They can surely do the magic in boosting your online sales.

It is therefore of paramount importance that you ensure your site is fully optimized for the likely terms your potential website visitor will be using when searching. For this reason keyword marketing research is an important facet of online marketing; without the most suitable keywords and optimized content your site could remain undiscovered.

Try placing yourself in the position of the potential website visitor, what keywords should you aim for?

Look at your site content; what would you use as search criteria?

What questions would you ask the search engine to track down as a solution to your problem?

These are only some of the many questions to consider whilst conducting your keyword marketing research; they are crucial to locate targeted traffic and the success of your website. Creating lists by hand is a way to start but is far from ideal, a much better means of achieving the best results in this area is to use a quality tool; an investment in such a tool can make keyword marketing research almost effortless. With manual research you could be wasting literally hours a day when there is software available that will allow you to conduct your keyword marketing research quickly and efficiently. These types of software really are push button easy.

You must also consider the following two points when choosing the best words. Firstly, what level of searches does the word or phrase receive per month; there is little point wasting your time optimizing your content on a keyword or phrase that receives no more than twenty searches per month. You should instead be selecting a word or phrase that receives between a few hundred to a few thousand per month. Secondly, try to identify keywords that have little competition; choosing a highly competitive keyword may result in your site never being found. Search engines are there to provide a service for their users. Their function is to provide the user with the best possible results in relation to the conducted search. You should ensure that you place your site in front of as many of these searchers as possible.

The trick is to rank for the many keywords that achieve hundreds or thousands of searches per month; with little competition these will be far more useful than keywords that get thousands to tens of thousands of searches per month with a lot of competition.

The majority of tools will allow you to locate keywords with high monthly search figures; using these tools will mean you can avoid wasting time on optimizing useless or ineffective keywords. But most importantly they will locate the words related to your search that have little or no competition. The keyword marketing research tools that you buy are far more robust and powerful than the many free tools available; if you seriously wish to achieve prominent site ranking and avoid time wasted on optimizing the wrong words a good quality keyword tool is essential.

While studying the creatives of competitors throughout my years in the paid search industry, as any self-respecting SEM should, too often have I witnessed the same thing: It seems as though countless search engine advertisers use the same title and description to appear for all of their keywords. Of course that makes my job considerably easier. However this never ceases to leave me more surprised than a person trying to find a half-decent slice of pizza in Connecticut for two reasons. Firstly, when applied to a generous search advertising budget, this practice of lumping a massive amount of keywords together with a limited number of creatives basically translates into non-converting clicks that number in the thousands of wasted ad-dollars. Secondly, creatives that do not appropriately match the keywords they represent often fail to interest visitors who would otherwise visit the site.

Here are a few thoughts on how to advertise for keywords that do not precisely correspond to your company’s product or services:

Step 1: Grouping Your Keywords into Campaigns and Adgroups

An ancient Buddhist story tells of a master who orders his overly-eager student to clean up the breakfast table, before moving onto philosophical discussion and meditation. The story goes that the key to enlightenment lies in the small details of life. The same applies to search marketing. Before envisioning creatives that stand out amongst those of your competitors, how much money to bid on a keyword, and what landing pages to design; it is necessary to be organized first.

There are several factors that determine why some keywords convert better than others. Some keywords are expensive while others are cheap. Some are synonyms of your company’s product while some only evoke a vague connection to what you’re selling. Grouping keywords together will allow you to write the appropriate creatives for each cluster of search terms. This will also allow you to initially make a rough estimate of the ROI that each of these search term clusters will yield.

The terminology adopted by Google for this purpose is a good and simple guide for a two step division of your keywords. Start by dividing your keyword list into general campaigns. Then divide each of these campaigns into Adgroups. All of the keywords that accurately describe your products or services should be presented in the same campaign or campaigns. In addition, all of the keywords that correspond to complementary or competing products that have not been sold but may still have marketing power should be bunched together into entirely separate campaigns. When dividing these Campaigns into Adgroups, remember that you will have to write separate creatives for each Adgroup. Finally, any keywords that contain the names of competing companies should also be contained into a single campaign named, for example, “Competitors”.

Although, Yahoo!Search only has one designated “category” column in its account management interface and insert sheets, it is always a good idea to carry over this distinction into your Yahoo!Search account. For example if your in the business of selling widgets, then a portion of your Adwords and Yahoo!Search account should look like the following:

In Adwords:
Campaign: Widgets
Adgroup: Widget_Accessories

In Yahoo!Search
Category: Widgets_Accessories

Step 2: Finding That Proper Balance in Your Creatives

The above title is a self-evident truth. Creatives that are to appear for Adgroups that contain keywords directly related to your products or services should generally be as clear and precise in both title and description. A good idea could also be to include pricing information in the description. Such Adgroups will generally receive the highest click through rates and subsequently conversion rates, as they accurately represent what the search engine user is looking for. This assumption depends on the quality of your creatives, landing pages, and, of course, products.

Now for the interesting part: Keywords that do not directly correspond to what your company is offering by nature tend to convert more poorly, hence lowering your overall cost per acquisition, conversion rate, and many more interesting indicators that serve to either impress your boss or secure that down payment on that car you’ve been wanting for a long time, depending what your life situation is. In any case, securing a low cost per acquisition rate and a high conversion rate for this type of broad or “not-so-directly-related-but-still-promising” keyword does require a good deal of balance. Your Adwords title and first line of description (title and first half of the description for Yahoo!Search) should correspond to the theme of the broad keywords in the Adgroup in question. It is also a good idea to place a landing page containing information on the subject in question on your landing page so that your visitor is not completely dissatisfied upon clicking on your ad. The second line of description should, on the contrary, be a direct call to action: Describe the purpose of your website and what products or services you offer. At this point don’t be afraid to imply that the point of your website is to make a sale. If done properly and with a little bit of style, writing creatives for your broader keywords while following these guidelines should make search engine users read your creatives from beginning to end. The general introduction to your creative should also provide you with a high enough click through rate to keep you from getting disabled on Google, while the concluding specific call to action should prevent too many uninterested users from clicking on your ad and needlessly driving up your daily spends.

When writing creatives for keywords that contain your competitors’ names, a good rule of thumb is never to include those company names into the creatives. Be sure not to use Google’s keyword insert function for titles in such Adgroups: {Keyword: _________}

Here are a couple of additional dos and don’ts for writing creatives:
- Do keep a recognizable convention in capitalization throughout your creative to add to your legitimacy. Whether you decide to go for the headline style or the regular sentence style, be sure not to switch in the middle of your creative.
- Do not be afraid to write in a simple style. Simplicity appeals to a wider audience, while complicated or technical jargon may alienate and confuse some potential visitors.

Step 3: Be Prepared to Recognize and Minimize Your Loss

With any great potential profit comes great risk. Being a good accountant is a necessary skill to successfully pull off your campaigns that contain “not-so-directly-related-but-still-promising” keywords.

Start by isolating the daily, weekly or monthly spends of each keyword group and sub-group in your advertising account. Then compare these figures with the number of acquisitions that each keyword group and sub-group received using your tracking software. This will enable you to quickly determine which campaigns are performing well and which are performing sluggishly in terms of indicators such as CPA. The grouping of keywords into campaigns that you expect to perform well and into campaigns that you suspect may cause some problems down the line offers the benefit of being able to quickly shut down the latter campaigns within minutes.

Step 4: AB Testing Creatives for Your Broader Keywords

An alternative to systematically shutting down poorly performing campaigns is to work on the creatives that appear for the keywords that they contain. For example, an excessive cost per acquisition for a single campaign may simply be resolved by writing a creative that resembles a sales pitch, in other words by telling search engine users that they just won’t be satisfied to visit the site unless they are willing to make a purchase. It’s simple but effective.

Conversely, advertisers who have a gift for designing landing pages in order to receive a high conversion rate can attempt to push their CTR limits by writing creatives that appeal to a very broad audience. A truly talented SEM can do this without causing a significant increase in CPA.

Conclusion

While managing your paid search campaigns remember that the tighter, more structured, and more organized your keyword sub-groups are, the easier it will be to write appropriate creatives for them. Also try working on creatives for your poorly-converting subgroup, rather than immediately bailing. It’s empowering, try it!

The whole reason for this shift in keyword utilization stems from the fact that search engine sites track and record the abuse of keywords. If you happen to have an article of 500 words containing nothing but the word “free”, chances are your site will be banned from the search engine.

This shift has also created a whole new industry in writing. You will definitely be able to get a few odd jobs writing search engine optimized (SEO) articles.

The key to writing good SEO articles is to be true to the subject at hand. Make sure that your SEO article contains relevant information and a substantial proportion of keyword scattered throughout the article. Include a keyword or phrase in the title of your article. Include a minimum of 2 keywords or phrases in the beginning and ending paragraphs of your article. Finally, scatter keywords in the body of your article. If you have a 500 word article, a minimum of 1 keyword or phrase per paragraph in the text body is recommended.

Write your article for your product, not for the sake of keywords. As you go on with your article, you will be using your keywords when you describe your product and when you give out instructions on how to use the product. Write about how the product came into existence and how it has developed through the years. Cite instances where the product has been particularly useful to you or to an acquaintance.

When writing the article, do not force the keyword issue. Your articles must be forthright, literate, easy and entertaining to read. Some writers sacrifice grammar for the sake of a keyword placement. Don’t do that. When searchers are directed to an article of yours and it happens to contain spelling errors, wrong grammar and a generally sloppy composition, they might decide to look for another article or website that contains more nicely written content.

If you are unable to compose your own article because of time constraints, you can use freelance websites to hire article writers who will do the job for you. Prices for an original SEO article containing 500 to 750 words max range anywhere from $1 to $15. Just be sure to communicate well with the writers so that they fully understand what you require. Ask for previous work samples so you can judge whether their skills are up to your standards. If you come across a writer offering his service rather cheaply, don’t rush in and call yourself lucky. The best way to be sure that you have found a cheap but quality conscious worker is to ask him to provide one article to you. In exchange you will pay him for that one article and use it as criteria for judging his qualifications.

Try writing an article yourself before hiring it out to someone else. You, of all people, should know how the article must read.

The struggle between literate, grammatically correct article composition and keyword seeding should not exist at all. Search engines are able to figure out the relevance of the content on your website to a user’s query. Therefore, an article filled with a jumble of keywords will have lesser relevance than a well-written article containing lesser keywords.

Internet marketers who need SEO articles commonly require grammatically correct and literate compositions from SEO writers like me. The more I read and write about how search engines function and how they equate relevance with a high search result ranking, the more I strive to place overall composition above keyword content.

With relevant articles on your website pertaining to your products, ideas or services, you get more chances of directing the correct kind of surfer traffic to your website. Of course, this will mean a decrease in bulky but irrelevant traffic. However, as a search engine user, I find it annoying to see search results that have no connection to what I need to find.

Admittedly, most web masters prefer bulk traffic over highly relevant web traffic. The more the merrier, so to speak. In my experience, surfing the web without any purpose becomes tedious. It gets even more tedious as your experience in web surfing grows. Nowadays, I specifically surf the web with a purpose in mind. Armed with that purpose, I single-mindedly search for what I need.

It would help me to find what I need faster if the descriptive content of your website were relevant to my search. Having a nicely composed descriptive article about the idea or object I am seeking will make your website more useful to me. Because your website has been highly informative and usable, I will return there again to see if you have something that I need.

In having relevant and highly descriptive articles, your website satisfies two totally different necessities. The more relevant necessity for you would be a high ranking search result. The lesser, and often times unnoticed necessity, is that of having satisfied your customer.

The more relevant your content is, the more chances you have of being able to direct your target market to your website. The percentage of people who buy your product will definitely increase as opposed to a decrease in just passing thru or wrong turn traffic. In counterpoint, the more relevant traffic you get, the higher your sales figures go up.

Targeting traffic that isn’t really interested in your website almost serves no purpose. I definitely won’t try to remember the name of a website that has nothing of what I need. Memory retention of a website by people is very much minimal unless it has served the people well. Furthermore, to be redirected to an irrelevant website by a search engine is very much an annoyance. These websites that bombard their content with nothing but keywords are now getting penalized and banned by search engines so that they can avoid sending people to the wrong place.

How would you feel if directory assistance gave you the wrong listing? Naturally, the supervisor at directory assistance will reprimand the agent who gave the wrong listing. It’s the same thing with search engines and web site. Search engines are trying to provide internet surfers with good service in order to gain more traffic. The more traffic they have, the more expensive their advertising space becomes. Along comes a web master who abuses their system so that all traffic is directed to his website. How do you think a search engine operator will react to or against the evil web master?

Don’t sacrifice the quality of your website content for quantity of traffic. It almost serves no purpose anyway and only gets the search engines enraged.

To start with lets look at writing for a subject you are unfamiliar with. The key to this is to start out by getting a feel for the subject. Quite simply, read a lot. The more you can read the greater your level of understanding will be about the subject that you are focusing on. When you are on track with the subject, try making a few notes on the buzz words or keywords, for the particular subject of interest.

As an example, if you are going to write about internet marketing then you would want to know a bit about SEO, web 2.0 and web site linking to get started. Basically if you read and become aware of the main catch phrases around any given industry, then the chances are you are well on your way to writing articles that effectively incorporate these key words.

The next tip is to start writing the article. Dont worry at this stage about the keywords, simply write the article in a concise and articulate manner. This provides you with a quality article that is interesting to the reader, not just a piece of work that incorporates a number of keywords that are attractive to search engines. When you have done this then you are ready to start considering how your keywords fit in with the subject you have written about.

The next thing that you need to look at is the popularity of the keywords that you have selected here. There are tools that can help you evaluate search engine trends as well as the word searches that are conducted. What you are looking for is more highly targeted searches, with phrases of 2 or more keywords that are the most popular for the subject that you are writing about. When you have identified these then you are ready to make sure that they can be found in your article.

A tip for putting keywords into you article is to firstly identify the most relevant keywords or key phrases, and then include them in a natural way in your article. This is why it is worthwhile writing the article first without thinking about them. You will now probably find as you read through what you have written your article in such a way that there are natural places where you have included the keywords without purposefully doing so. To increase the regularity with which these occur, you can now go through and find similar words and change to your selected keywords, without changing the overall appeal for the reader.

Lastly, two important tips are to proofread and write a keyword rich headline. When you have changed the original words that you used in your first article draft and when you have incorporated keyword, it is likely that you have made the odd slip up or the context of what you have written has changed slightly. Either way it is vital that you review what you have written and make sure that you have expressed exactly what you intended to, with out serious problems in grammar and punctuation.

Finally, make sure that you have a good keyword enhanced title for your article. When you select the keywords, and after you have read about a topic, researched and written a piece, you should have a good idea how to express what you have written in a succinct manner, and with the maximum usage of the main keywords. You want to be careful that you dont lose the meaning by in cramming in keywords, but if you are going to get the title right then you want to try and insert the keywords into the heading so that they become the primary focus.

So keeping these tips in mind you are ready to know begin writing articles that are well written and have a good balance between keyword content and genuine content that has value for the reader. When you strike the right balance you are well on the way to creating good keyword articles that will strike this balance and be found easily be the search engines.

Researching keywords is one of the fundamental tasks of any SEO efforts. Basically there are a couple of keyword research tools that everyone is using. My website also have a useful related information about SEO and Search Engine guide. SEO is the keyway to reach your website at TOP Search Ranking.

http://sengine.justfree.com/

While these tools produce a nice list of keywords and their respective number of searches, I have to warn you – the number of searches per keyword is very inaccurate.

The data on the number of searches is critically important. You can work on keywords for months and when you finally clinch the top spot you may discover that the number of daily searches per keyphrase is about 100 to 1000 times less than the above tools predicted. I will give you examples below.

The number of searches per keyword is inaccurate because:

Overture and Wordtracker aggregate keyword variants and phrases (single, plural, misspellings, bigger phrases into smaller phrases etc.) Wordtracker uses data from meta search engines that have different demographics than the major search engines

Never ever believe the Wordtracker and Overture number of searches per keyword. I’ve learned this the hard way.

There is a much better and completely free way to estimate the number of searches per keyphrase on Google! I have found it to be much more accurate than Wordtracker and Overture. When you have the rough number of searches on Google, you can (in 99.99% of the cases) safely assume than Yahoo and MSN will provide less traffic than Google for these keywords.

How to estimate the real traffic per keyphrase (number of searches x CTR)

The answer is simple – Google Adwords Traffic Estimator

Here is the procedure. Let’s say you want to estimate the number of searches per day for the keyphrase “calorie counter”. At the moment I write this newsletter, Overture and Wordtracker provide this data (using DigitalPoint’s keyword suggestion tool):

“calorie counter” on Overture -3587 searches per day
“calorie counter” on Wordtracker – 3072 searches per day

This seems like a very high-volume keyword. But is it?

Checking Google’s AdWords Traffic Estimator.

1.       Go to Google AdWords Traffic Estimator

2.       Put [calorie counter] in there. Using the [] to enclose the query means you want to bid when someone searches exactly for the keyphrase calorie counter (that will exclude searches like activity calorie counter, food calorie counter etc.)

3.       Select the various options to make the campaign such as Global searches or Regional etc.

4.       Select the countries you wish to estimate searches from. “All Countries” would work great for estimating global number of searches

5.       Now set the Maximum Cost Per Click to $100. That will put you in position number #1 which gets the highest click-through ratio.

6.       Now we get an estimate of 94 clicks per day. Compare 94 to 4000? That’s a huge difference. The traffic estimate is based on the CTR of the ad placed on the top spot for the given keywords on Google and their search network.

So what is the real number of searches for the keyphrase calorie counter on Google? It is roughly 94 / (divided) Google’s estimated CTR for the top ad spot on these keywords.

The difficult part here is to guess the estimated CTR that Google uses. We also have to factor in that the estimated number of clicks includes searches on other search engines and that it includes second, third etc. page clicks (Google shows the given ad on second, third etc. SERP pages).

I use these coefficients to estimate the real traffic (not number of searches) potential of keywords on Google. It is based on my experience with the keywords I have monitored.

To find the traffic potential of the given keyphrase (in our case, calorie counter) on Google multiply the number of clicks (94) by:

1.       5 to 10 for SERP position #1

2.       2 to 5 for SERP position #2

3.       1 to 3 for SERP position #3

For calorie counter we get these estimates:

1.       470 to 940 clicks per day being #1 on Google for calorie counter

2.       188 to 470 clicks per day being #2 on Google for calorie counter

3.       94 to 282 clicks per day being #3 on Google for calorie counter

The above ranges for the top 3 SERP spots will vary from keyword to keyword. As I’ve written, I have based them on the queries I monitor. The accuracy will depend on the CTR of the top spot ad on AdWords.

My experience has shown that the top 3 spots in the SERPs will in most cases get at least 10 times less traffic than Overture and Wordtracker predict. Being ranked below top 3 will have a more drastic difference.

Here’s another example. Consider the keyphrase big muscle.

“big muscle” on Overture -1132 searches per day “big muscle” on Wordtracker – 772 searches per day [big muscle] on Google – 4.1 clicks per day

My Traffic Estimates on Google’s SERPs (for big muscle)

Position #1 – 20 to 41 clicks per day Position #2 – 8 to 20 clicks per day Position #3 – 4 to 12 clicks per day

My estimates may or may not be super accurate, but I have found them to be generally accurate in most cases. Compared to Overture and Wordtracker they will be much more accurate. In my experience, the volume of searches per most keyphrases on Yahoo and MSN is considerably lower than on Google at the moment. Google is still the most important search engine in terms of traffic potential.

If you have top positions for some keywords and track them, run the above calculations on Overture, Wordtracker and Google AdWords Traffic Estimator data and let me know on the forum how accurate is the procedure I have proposed in this newsletter.

If you don’t have top 10 rankings and want to spend money on Google AdWords you can find out a better estimate for the number of searches by running an AdWords campaign where:

you bid enough to be in top 8 (first page ads) for your keywords you bid on [your keywords] you bid only on Google’s search engine

The number of impressions produced by such a campaign will indicate the real volume of searches, but this method costs money. Although it includes impressions on second, third etc. SERP pages, most searchers don’t go beyond the first page of results and you can assume this data to be fairly precise.

Thanks

Choosing the right keywords for a website is an important and informative research task. In the process of improving your website you’ll learn a lot about your industry and your competitors.

Keywords are one the main factors that come into play in the algorithms used by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search. If a web surfer is looking for home decorating tips and types ‘home decorating’ into a search engine, it will search its database for websites that contain that phrase and those individual words.

Selecting the correct keywords

If you are an expert in your field, you know what your customers are looking for. Specifically, you know many of the words and phrases your customers would use to describe your products and services. Start with what you know.

Write out a list of phrases and words that describe your business. If you have a home decorating business you may think of words like ‘interior design’ and ‘furnishings’. Sort your list so that the most common phrases are on the top of your list.

You will now want to cross-reference the list of keywords that you have compiled with other lists generated for your industry. This will bring to mind other keywords that you may not have thought of. I recommend using a popular web-based keyword research tool named Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com). Wordtracker helps identify additional keywords and phrases and offers a free trial of their service. It provides only a limited number of related words, but is still a great starting point. Searching for related keywords for ‘home decorating’ with Wordtracker produces a list of keywords like ‘home’, ‘decor’, ‘decorating’, ‘home decor’, ‘furniture’, ‘design’, ‘interior’, ‘interior decorating’, ‘art’, ‘wall’, and ‘fabric’.

Other keyword tools, which produce similar results, are also available. These include, among others, the web-based tools provided by Yahoo (Overture) (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), and Google (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

After compiling and merging the various lists of keywords, you’ll be ready to move on to the next step.

Using the correct keywords on your website

Now that you have a clear picture of which keywords web surfers may type into their search engine to find your business, you need to be sure your website contains these important keywords.

A strategy is required when updating your website to include the keywords in your list. Starting at the top of your list, quickly review the keywords. Think about which keywords would naturally be present on your website and which keywords you probably wouldn’t use. Using the first list of keywords, you may now start reviewing the different sections of your website.

Your selected keywords should be placed in various areas of your site with the proper frequency. Your website content should focus on making sense to your visitors, not fed with keywords that will hopefully improve your search positioning. Search engine algorithms can detect the over use of keywords, which can negatively affect your positioning. Let’s now look at different areas of your website.

Website Title

Every website has a title. This is not a website logo or a bold heading found on the top section of a website. The website title is displayed in the web browser’s title bar. This is the top most area of the window located to the far left of the window’s minimize, maximize, and close buttons. The website title is also the text that is displayed in search engine search results, which is often in a larger font and underlined. The website title is the first thing that a web surfer sees when performing a search. Web surfers quickly scan through search result website titles to evaluate which website will meet their needs. This is your first opportunity to grab their attention.

A website title should contain as many of your keywords as possible, while maintaining easy readability. This will do two things for you. First, the search engine will find your website in its database and display your website in their results. Second, the website title will catch the surfer’s interest as they see their search criteria matching your website title. Over-stuffing the title with keywords makes the title difficult to read and may be seen as abuse by search engines. The website title is updated by changing the text located between the opening and closing title tags, in the header of the HTML code. The title length should be kept to handful of words. The website description allows more space for describing your products and services.

Website Description

As with the website title, the website description should also contain a variety of keywords. Unlike the website title, the website description is not visible on any part of the website itself. The description is the summary information you see in search engines results, displayed below the website title. The website description gives you a little more space to describe your website and your products and services. Again, be sure that your description is easily readable for your visitors, in order to attract them to click your site title. The website description can be updated by changing the text in the description meta tag, in the header of the HTML code.

Website Keywords

Along with the title and description entries in the HTML code, there is also an area to define a set of keywords that you’d like to associate to the page. This is called the keyword meta tag. Keywords are entered as a comma separated list. The industry consensus is that the keyword meta tag is currently of little or no use with today’s major search engines. However, search engines continue to recommend their usage.

Website Content

This brings us to the meat of our website, so to speak. Our chosen keywords should be used throughout the website content where it makes sense. Again, over-stuffing page content with keywords so that the message is unnatural can be detected by search engines. A good practice is to use the keywords to make the page content more descriptive. For example, a pet store may sell a variety of pet foods. This can be written in a descriptive manner, such as, ‘dog food and cat food’, instead of using ‘dog and cat food’. In this example the keyword ‘food’ is used twice.

Headings and Hyperlinks

Special attention should be given to the usage of heading tags and anchor tags. Keyword usage in page heading is more valuable than keywords used in a paragraph of text. The same can be said with anchor tags (a.k.a. hyperlinks). Using keywords as the clickable text of a hyperlink is very valuable.

Keyword Density

Keyword density refers to the percentage of occurrences of your keywords compared to the other text on the web page. Keyword density tools such as Webconfs.com’s Keyword Density Checker (http://webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) provides a visualization of the main theme or message on a chosen page. This tool counts the number of times each word is repeated on the page, which is a good test of how you’ve done at inserting keywords to optimize the content. It is also a good representation of how search engines will see your page. ‘More is better’ is not the most effective keyword density goal. Although the optimum keyword density is much debated, having some balance is definitely in order. A density below 1% makes it difficult for a search engine to understand your main message, where a density over 5% will start to make the content appear unnatural. At this stage in website optimization, the page content can be continually edited while the keyword density is being re-checked. Continue this process until your keywords are among the words with the highest density.

Conclusion

Choosing the correct keywords for your website is a must. Website keyword optimization is not rocket science, but it must be implemented carefully. By using the correct keywords, not only will your site be positioned well in search results, but it will draw visitors to your website.

If you followed through with the exercises from Part One you should have a good solid list of keywords to work with. If you don’t; please go back to Part One of this article and develop the keyword list first. Your list should consist of every possible relevant keyword for your market; including very general to very specific keywords.

So lets get down to the analyzing.

A free tool that I have used over and over is called ‘Good Keywords’ and is available for download at http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw/. Go get this first as we will use it extensively for this part of the project.

Developing your keywords is the most important part of building your online business. The keywords you choose are vital to your success. Choosing top keywords that generate too many search occurrences; and that are too competitive will make it very difficult if not impossible for the average person to obtain top level placement on the major search engines. Choosing keywords that receive too little search volume will get you too the top of the search engines; but since nobody really searches for these keywords; you won’t receive any traffic. Therefore; I can not stress enough the importance of choosing the right keywords. Spending a lot of time doing research and brainstorming for this part of your online business will pay off ten fold in the end results.

So how do we analyze keywords? We analyze them one at a time. It will seem a bit tedious but pace yourself; take breaks if you need to; walk away from it and come back later.

We’ll start with the list you developed in Part One of this series. When you open the ‘Good Keywords’ tool; you are presented with a menu. From this menu choose ‘Keyword Suggestions’. This will open another window in which you can enter your first keyword in the box provided. Below this box you’ll see an option ‘Research Using’. Here you can select the engine you want to retrieve data from. Overture US should be the default. If it isn’t then lets choose Overture from the drop down list. Depending on how you plan to market your website you may change the ‘Research Using’ engine. I’ll discuss this in more detail in an upcoming article on Marketing Your Website For Performance or PPC.

For the purpose of this exercise lets enter the keyword phrase ‘Santa Letter’ and click on ‘Go’. Sometimes you’ll receive a message ‘lookup failed’. This is normal and simply means the server is too busy. If this happens just click ‘Go’ again until you receive results in the right hand window. From my search I received 92 results. You will see from the list that there are many variations of the phrase Santa Letter. What you see are recent incremental results from Overture’s database of any searches containing the keyword phrase ‘Santa Letter’. The number to the right of each keyword is the number of times that particular phrase has been search for in the past 30 days on Overture.

Now if you were to have compiled a list of keywords for this phrase prior to using this tool then you may already have some of the returned keywords in your list. That’s good! That means you were thorough in your research of keyword phrases.

Now let have a look at the list to see what keywords are relevant for us. I am looking for keywords for a campaign or website offering Letters from Santa for children or loved ones at Christmas time. Right away I see one phrase that is ‘free from letter Santa’. This is not a phrase I am going to want to use as I am trying to sell a service of providing letters from Santa for a fee. So you can see that not all the results will be relevant to our particular website. What we will do is go through the list and select the ones we want. First; let’s go back to the main menu for the Good Keywords tool. We’ll click on ‘Keyword Organizer’. In the window that opens select ‘Keyword Set Menu’ and then click on ‘Add Keyword Set’. Now in this window type ‘Santa Letter’ and click OK. This will create a new Keyword set and give us a place to store our keyword research for this particular phrase. Now going back to the ‘Keyword Suggestions’ windows; hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard. You’ll see one on the left and right side of your keyboard on the very bottom row. While holding Ctrl down; with the mouse; click on a couple of keywords you want to include in your keyword list. Just for the purpose of this exercise we’ll select ‘letter Santa’ and ‘from letter Santa’. The selections will be highlighted if done correctly. Using the right mouse button, right click on your second selection; go to Copy to Organizer and select ‘Selected Keywords’. Using the drop down menu; select ‘Santa Letter’ and click the OK button. This will copy only the keywords you’ve selected to the category ‘Santa Letter’ in the Keyword Organizer’ tool. To verify this; lets go back to the Keyword Organizer for a minute. Click on Santa Letter and you’ll see your keywords. This gives us a means of keeping track of only the keywords we want while eliminating some of the confusion from a massive list. Normally; for your own list; you would repeat this process for each of your keywords and keyword phrases you’ve chosen. For the purpose of this exercise we’ll only use those two selected phrases.

Okay so if your still with me; lets go back to the ‘Keywords Selection’ tool where you should still have the list of keyword results for ‘Santa Letter’. Using the mouse; lets double click on ‘letter personalized Santa’ in the list.

What happens? Double clicking this keyword causes the tool to resubmit that one particular keyword back to Overture to be analyzed. The result is a deeper analysis returning variations of that particular phrase. You will likely have fewer results than your initial search; however this is a crucial part of keyword analysis. You can do this step for any keyword in the list but for instance if you try it with the top keyword the result is actually the same as the original result. Why? Because it is the same two words just in reversed order; therefore the tool will return the same results.

People who omit this part of the keyword building process miss out on huge niche market opportunities.

Now again; as we did before you may right click on whichever keywords you’d like to add to your list and copy them over to the keyword organizer tool. Since this is only an example and we’ve already covered that I don’t feel it’s necessary to repeat this process. Also; you can and should continue your research by double clicking any phrase you’ve added from this new list. I personally follow each and every relevant phrase right until the end where no further results are returned. Be sure to continue to add each new keyword to the ‘Keyword Organizer’. This will be your final list that you will use when building and marketing your site.

Now I’m sure you have some questions at this point concerning keywords. For example; how many keywords can I use for my website. Opinions will vary. I have seen recommendations of using a maximum of 25 keywords. Keep the following in mind.

A big part of optimizing your website for top placement in the search engines will be the relationship between ‘content’ and keywords. This is referred to as ‘Keyword Density’ and will be the topic of the third installment of ‘So You Want To Start An Online Business’. Basically what it refers to is using your chosen keywords in the content of your website; in optimal places and also in a number optimal occurrences. It is possible to use a keyword too much and will actually hurt you in your placement with the search engines. No keyword content in your website or too little also hurts your site; as does having keywords in the wrong places. There are plenty of tools available that will guide you through this process. One of the more popular is IBP or Internet Business Promoter and can be found by doing a search.

In the meantime; continue the development of your keyword list; analyzing results as deeply as possible.

In the next article we will discuss keyword density. You may think this is a bit premature as you haven’t even started building your website; but trust me; this is another common mistake people make. It is much easier to have a flowchart to follow when building your site than it is to go back and make changes that allow proper keyword density later. Unless you’re a programmer; then you’d have no troubles. Otherwise; spend some time optimizing and refining your keywords; and stay tuned for Part Three.

To Your Success;

Joseph Murray

Obviously the fee-based software provides several upgraded features that can be a real benefit to business, but the use of the free keyword search can help you see what might work best for your online company.

WordTracker indicates, “The best keywords are those words and phrases commonly typed in by your potential customers, but which aren’t used much on your competitors websites.”

Did you catch that. The best keywords are not necessarily the words that you would most likely think of using when evaluating your business. It is looking for words that poteital customers use to find what you sell, but are not being used by your competition.

In essence when you use these words you can begin to develop an improved site ranking because you used these words. You don’t have to guess which words are best to use, you simply find those keywords that fit – and are not currently in use – by other similar online companies.

The cautionary tale in this scenario is that you should make sure you don’t use such obscure words that only a handful of potential customers find your site. You should also seek a balance between what is used and what probably shouldn’t be.

Sometimes your choice can be as simple as a keyphrase that is widely used for a search of your product, but is a slight expansion on the most popular keywords or phrases.

For example if you sold computers and the most popular key phrase is ‘new computers’, but the phrase ‘new hi-speed compter’ is not used as much it might make sense to use that as a key phrase for your company. On the other hand if there is a key phrase of ‘new hi-speed USB capable computer’ you might want to avoid it simply because the chances are this phrase is no only cumbersome, but is less likely to be called upon in most consumer searches.

SEO is a difficult proposition in the best of circumstances, but the use of various online tools and software can help you come to terms with what may be the best means of positioning your site to attract the most attention from potential customers.

The end result of your time investment may be an improved bottom line.