Thursday, June 25, 2009

Keywords For Websites – How To Get The Right Keywords For Your Website – And Why It Matters

Choosing the right keywords is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. The keywords and phrases you choose can make an enormous difference to the amount of visitors your website receives. The best source of traffic to your site is free visitors from search engines, because they cost you nothing and you know they are searching for something related to whatever it is your site has to offer.

Getting the best keywords can make the difference between your website being found by thousands of free visitors or by no-one at all. The reason for this is that it is not enough just to choose words that sum up what your site is about or what you think visitors will enter into a search engine when they are seeking the information or product that your site offers. You may guess correctly at a phrase that lots of people search for every day, but if millions of other websites are all also targeting that same phrase, it is highly unlikely that you will show up near the top of the search results.

The importance of your web pages being near the top of the search results cannot be overstated. Many net surfers will not look beyond the first three results, and hardly any past the first three pages. If your site is not in the top thirty, your traffic will be negligible. So the trick with keywords is to choose the ones that people are definitely searching for, but which not too many other websites are competing for. That way you have a much better chance of getting to the top of the results pages and catching those people who are searching for that keyword.

You can check the number of websites competing for any keyword by doing a Google search for the word and putting quotation marks before and after it. The results of this search will only include those sites which actually feature that keyword, so just look for the number of results and that tells you how many sites you are in competition with. It is much better to come top of the search results for a keyword that is searched for twenty times a day than nowhere for one that is searched for two hundred times a day.

There is no point using any keyword, however, unless you know that people are actually searching for it, and the only way to find that out is to use a keyword research tool. There are many keyword research tools available, and needless to say some are better than others, and some cost more than others. Most search engine optimization tools will include a keyword tool as part of their package, or you can buy keyword tools separately. Either way, you should ensure that you find one that generates, and lets you explore, lots of keyword ideas, and which organises all your results and reports for you.

A good system will give you hundreds of keywords that you never even thought of using. You will find yourself with an awful lot of valuable data that you need to be able to store, analyse and report on, so your system needs to be able to accommodate this in a user friendly way.

Source: Articledashboard

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