Thursday, June 25, 2009

Keywords For Websites – Advice On Choosing The Most Profitable Keywords For Your Website

As a basic principle of search engine optimization, the importance of effective keyword research is well understood. It is the selection of the most appropriate keywords that will drive free search engine traffic to your site. What is less well understood, though, is that the choices you make about which keywords you use can also directly affect how profitable those website visitors are.

Part of selecting the best keywords is about choosing keywords most likely to be used by people interested in whatever it is your website is about. That way the visitors who arrive at your site are far more likely to spend time on it, buy something, follow an affiliate recommendation, etc. If the keyword you use is unrelated to what your website is about, the visitors will quickly move on. Taking this a step further, however, you can carefully select keywords that mean the visitors arriving at your site are far more likely to take whatever action it is that you most want them to.

For example, if you have a site selling abstract paintings, you could choose ‘paintings’ as a keyword. If you managed to compete against all the other sites using this, you would get lots of visitors who were actually more interested in other types of paintings than abstract ones. If you chose ‘abstract paintings’ instead, you would then get people who were definitely interested in something to do with abstract paintings, but many of whom had no intention of buying one. If you select ‘buy abstract paintings’ then you really are getting to the visitors who are going to bring you some money, and if you use ‘buy abstract paintings now’, they have probably already got their credit card out!

So choosing a keyword that homes in on who your ideal visitors are might rule out some of the other traffic, but by having the right visitors in the first place you could get more income from far less people, as the rate of conversion to sales would be much higher. The same principle obviously applies even if you do not sell goods directly. Choosing keywords for a site recommending affiliate products would work in exactly the same way.

If you bear this in mind when doing your keyword research, you can begin to design a site that is far more likely to attract visitors that will actually put money in your pocket. Effective keyword research is obviously the key to this technique, so you will need a research tool that will generate lots of new ideas and related subjects, which you can then drill down into to find those highly profitable words and phrases.

It is not possible to carry out effective keyword research without a good keyword tool, whether this is part of an SEO software package or a stand alone keyword tool. This is because there is no other way of knowing how many people are actually searching for those terms on a daily basis. To go back to my example, selecting ‘buy abstract paintings now’ is great in theory, but it is a waste of time unless I know that enough people are searching for it to bring me visitors.

Source: Articledashboard

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