Find The Best Keywords For Your Site
Keyword optimisation is probably the main thing you would like to concentrate on with regards to search engine optimization (SEO). Unfortunately, not many folks know this, or do enough to optimise their sites' keywords. Before I knew the importance of keyword optimisation, I used to pluck any keywords that seemed relevant to my website, insert them into my title tag and meta tags, then submitted my site to the search engines. And then wondered why I did not really get much traffic.
Well, now I have learnt something: Be sure that you don't rush, and you need to do your due studying to learn what are the keywords which are best for your website.
To do so, have a close look at the first page of your site, and try to get a sense of what that page is all about. Is the theme defined and clear? Or are there a lot of conflicting topics on this single page?
Your readers and the search engines favor a single themed page which focuses on one specific topic, so try to keep to a topic. Split up your page into multiple pages if you discover it to be too long or too intricate.
As soon as you've done that, try to discover the key words of your page. These are the words or phrases which can best describe your content. Put yourself in your readers' shoes: what sort of phrases or words would they use if they wanted to get a page like yours via a search engine? Make a list of those keywords and keyphrases, and do not be worried about making it as long as you need, you can scratch off all of the excess keywords later.
Your aim is to attempt and discover the a couple of keywords which are best for your site, and optimise your website for them. Also try to eliminate those highly aggressive, single-word keywords such as"books","dvds","mp3","toys","computers". You don't need these keywords, as it's so tough to get a great ranking with them. Hundreds of thousands of different sites are targeting those highly popular keywords and phrases, and it's just not worth your effort.
Remember, it's always preferable to rank 5th for a less popular search phrase than to be rated 500th to get an extremely popular search term! Pick keywords or keyphrases that still have searches done for them, but aren't that competitive.
To have a quote on the prevalence of a search phrase, use a free service. You might also need to think about WordTracker, which is a paid service, but gives you a much clearer picture on which key words are better to optimise for. WordTrack does provide a trial option, so that you can use this to try out their service, or hunt for good key words if you only have a little, one-time site project.
As soon as you've got an idea of the popularity of the keywords and keyphrases on your list, look at scratching off the commonly used phrases. You may also find some new terms with these tools also, and you can add them to your listing.
And that is it! You should now have a list of great, medium-popularity keywords and keyphrases. Be certain that you repeat this procedure for all your webpages, and also have a slighlty different list for every single page that you have.