Choosing keywords

What ever type of web site you have there's a list of possible keywords with which to describe it and the products or services you're selling. Unless you're only interested in selling advertising space you need to select your keywords carefully, to ensure that you are going to get targeted visitors, the ones that are specifically interested in the products or services that you have to offer

A keyword defined in this context is a word that a user searches for when using a search engine. Combinations of keywords are known as keyphrases or keyword phrases

Build a keyword list!

Compile a list of keywords by writing down every possible word a person might use when searching for your web site. Now you need to know whether people actually do any searches on those words or phrases. A great tool for finding out what keywords people are searching on and more importantly how many searches are being made on that word or phrase is WordTracker. Use this SEO tool to make sure you rank highly for keywords that people are actually using in searches

You should now have a short list of words that pertain to your sites theme and are also words that a significant amount of people are using when searching for your type of products or services

Next you need to incorporate these words and phrases into the body of text on your pages. Don't forget to include common misspellings of your keywords, you can pick up extra traffic here, as well as there being less competition than for correctly spelt words - Hint: if you use a misspelt word (or any word) in your meta-keyword then make sure it is also represented in the body text of the page, some search engines will penalise you otherwise

Getting your site to rank highly on one keyword can be pretty hard, additionally it can also inefficiently target general searchers, rather than specific ones. For example, the keyword 'cars' is more general than 'sports cars', which in turn is more general than 'British sports cars'. Two, three and four word phrases are the best to concentrate on, while single keywords are to hard to get a decent rank on, five and more keyword phrases are not what the majority of people use when searching

When it comes to the text on your page most search engines read the first 250 words, keep this in mind when writing your web page copy, try to use your most important keywords inside the first paragraph of the page and aim to have your overall word count average around 300 words

Good writing and writing for search engines

If you are an adept writer, you may have to suppress some of the good practices you previously used when writing text. For example, many good writers hate repeating a particular word too often, instead they prefer to use alternative terms that have a similar meaning. Although this makes your copy more readable, it doesn't help your site get a top rank in search engine results

If you want your page to have a high ranking when someone searches on your keyword phrase, keep repeating the phrase in your document instead of substituting it with pronouns like 'it or they'. Do this with two to three keyword phrases per page, but remember people have to read the text also, so some good judgment is needed here

What is the correct keyword density?

Keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for compared to the total number of words that are on that page. One of the easiest ways to improve your site's rank in most search engine results page is to work on the "keyword density" of your web pages. For example, if your keyword occurred only once in a page of three hundred words, it would have a lower keyword density than one that occurred seven times in a page of comparable length

There is no single figure for correct keyword density, but as a rule of thumb sticking between 3% and 8% will give satisfactory results. Although having a higher density for a particular keyword in your web page will in all likelihood increase your chances of a good search engine rank, not all search engines bother to use keyword density

Warning - overdo it with the number of times you repeat a word and you could be found guilty of keyword stacking (spamming)

Some people think that to get high densities for a keyword on a page you simply make pages with fewer words in. For example, a page that only contained "Search engine optimisation, placement, ranking, positioning services" would have a high density for the keyword "placement". The problem is search engines don't look at it this way, they will give a higher ranking to a page that has a similar keyword density but which has a total word count in the order of three hundred words or a text file size of roughly 5Kb or more

Some search engines, such as Lycos, will not index pages unless they contain a minimum word count (approx. 100 words)

Keyword proximity

Search engines don't view keywords only in the order in which they were typed. By default many if not all of the major engines and directories search for all the words used in the search term, but they also take into account "word proximity"

Pages that have an exact match for a search term e.g. "better search engine placement" will come up first in a search. After a search engine determines pages that have an exact match it will list pages that have the words of the search phrase in close proximity, as in "get better placement with search engine optimisation"

As well as putting keywords in your body text as close to the top of the page as you can, you also want to place them as close to each other as possible. Try to come up with some unusual keywords that not too many of your competitors have thought of. But make sure it is still specific and still relates to the topic of your site. You never know, there might be a keyword for your type of site that people are using that your competitors don' t know about

Keyword truncation and stemming

Some search engines have the ability to truncate or stem words. What this means is that if you use the keyword "secrets" and someone does a search using the keyword "secret" then your keyword has the chance of being factored into their search, this is because if you truncate your keyword you come up with the searchers keyword

Take this into account when you select your keywords. Try to have keywords that can be broken down into alternative searchable words if at all possible

Sell your sites benefits with keywords

The best way to develop sales content is to sell the benefits not the product specifications. So it makes sense that your keywords should also describe these benefits. Selling the benefits is what gets people to go from the search engine to your site and once there, buy. So when selecting your keywords pick ones that can meet the dual criteria of selling the benefits and being words that are highly searched on

Don't forget, an excellent tool for finding out how many people are searching on a particular word or phrase is WordTracker

where to use Keywords