Nine Steps To Finding All The Right Keywords

Nine Steps to finding All the Right Keywords

Let’s begin by stating the obvious:

Start by making a list of every possible key word you can think of that your potential customers might use while searching for what you are selling.

There is a good chance you will easily come up with a list of twenty or so before you start to run out of ideas. That is when you should resort to the tips and tools that will help you continue the brainstorming process of building your raw keyword list.
The following nine guidelines will help make this process as productive as possible.

1. Be specific

When selecting your keywords, you want to avoid words t ht are too general, such as travel. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, you will face very stiff competition. Other site have already spent enormous amounts of time and money to secure top position for such general keywords, and knocking those site out of their entrenched positions can be extremely difficult and even unproductive for a sales-conversion perspective.

Second, general keywords like travel are so broad that they could apply to all kinds of products and services-travel guide, travel insurance, travel accessories, and travel tours are just a few of the possible key phrases associated with the keyword travel. Unless you happen to sell every product and service related to travel, you should not waste your time and resources bringing traffic to your site that isn’t likely to buy that you are selling.

Example: Let’s say you sell travel packages to Europe. Obviously, you want to attract European travel package buyers. Rather than target the keyword travel, a much better keyword would be travel europe or travel packages to Europe. By targeting these much more specific keywords, you will bring a far more targeted prospect to your site-one who is much more likely to find what they are looking for and buy from you.

However, when looking for keywords that are specific to your business niche, keep in mind that sometimes keywords can be too specific. You shouldn’t optimize your web pages for keywords that none of your potential customers are using. You want to find keywords that are right in the middle of these two extremes.

2. Put Yourself In Your Customer’s Shoes

Ask Yourself

What product does my product (or service) solve for my typical customer? Sometimes this difference between a company that succeeds and one that fails is simply a matter of talking to its customers and asking the right questions. Learning how to interview your customers can be the x-factor, the magic bullet, the missing link between failing miserably and succeeding spectacularly.

These days people with computers who shop online are almost ubiquitous. It is not hard to gather an informal group and watch as they attempt to locate a product or service within your company’s sales niche. If you’re selling a consumer product, such as cell phone, then friends and family could help in this regard. Sit down with them at a computer, ask them to find your products or services, and see what searches they perform, you may discover a keyword or group of keywords you and your competitors have overlooked.

Remember to keep a customer’s perspective. Don’t make the mistake of assuming what you know what customers call your products. Do the necessary research to find out what words customers actually use to search your products.

Learn to speak like your customers as well. Real people don’t tend to search using jargon, so unless you are selling to insiders within your own industry, you should avoid using industry jargon. Think about words and phrases that real customers, not industry insiders, would use in a search.

On the other hand, if you are selling to industry insiders, then by all means, jargon away! Reading trade magazines is a good way to familiarize your self with industry catch phrases. You can also mine the indexes and glossaries of books about the business that you are in, as well as browse internet forums dedicated to the particular industry, product or service that you are targeting.

3. Glean Keywords fro your Website’s Referral Logs
Although obvious (at least to us) but so often overlooked, your website’s referral logs are an indispensable source of feedback regarding which keywords your site visitors are finding your through.

Referrals coming from search engines will include the keyword query that a searcher used to find your site. People often search using some very unusual search queries-terms that you and your competitors might never think to optimize for. Once again, this can give you a leg up on the competition, even in competitive fields, by enabling you to capitalize on more specific and more targeted keywords.

4. Check Out Your Competition

Once you have acquired a small list (shoot for about 30 keywords), run some searches on Google and Yahoo for those potential keywords and see whose pages are coming up in the search results. This will help you discover which keywords your competitors are actually targeting.

Once you find who you will be competing with, scour their web pages for more keywords that you may over look.

You can also view the source code of your competitors’ web pages to determine which keywords they are optimizing for within their keywords meta tag.

Often the keywords meta tag is poorly done or non-existent, so you may have to look at several pages before you find anything you have not already thought of, however, you can still pick up a few good keywords this way.

But remember not to get too caught up in what your competition is doing. Ideally, you are looking to find high-traffic keywords that your competitors are not optimizing their pages for.

A word of caution is in order here. There are court cases that suggest the use of competitor’s company name, product names or trademarks when used as keywords could be interpreted as trademark infringe. Bear that in mind when mining your competitor’s pages to brainstorm new keywords. If it questionable, you should consult your own legal council for advice on this matter. Clearly this book is no substitute for qualified legal advice.

5. Cover all Your Keyword Variations
Next, look for variations on keywords you think might be successful. This includes misspellings, plurals, synonyms, merged words, or keywords separated by hyphens.

Misspellings
Sometimes targeting common misspellings of your keywords can be an easy source of traffic. For example, one estimate says that 20% of Britney Spears related searches are misspelled (why are we not surprised?) In some cases, you may even find the misspelled or non-grammatical version of a keyword gets more searches than the keyword itself.

For instance, let’s say that you’re optimizing for both versions of the search term. Never mind which one is actually correct. Your customers are always right. Whatever search term they are using to seek your product is functionally correct.

Of course, one must also take into account that Google and other engines have factored in the reality that many people are lazy spellers. That is why they offer the did you mean… feature, as in where they provide the option of clicking a link that leads to a corrected version of the search term’s results. Research shows
that most people actually click this corrected version of the link since it is so conveniently found above the rest of the search results.

Even so, there is no traffic to be had from the common misspellings of search terms. Whenever your offerings lend themselves t such, you should consider optimizing companion pages that glean traffic from bad spelling and other typical grammar mistakes whenever you know the terms involved are keywords that buyers use.

And, if your ego can stand the disharmony, you might consider placing both versions on the same page. Of course, you could choose to obscure the incorrect versions and even tuck them away inside your keyword meta tag.

Regardless, inexact and incorrect usage of keywords is a reality that consumers present to online merchants. That being the case, you should plan for such whenever it applies to what you are selling.
Plurals and Synonyms
Many search engines utilize a process called word stemming to identify plural versions of a keyword. In theory, this means that the search engine should recognize charity and charities as being the same word. In practice however, the search results for singular and plural versions of a keyword are rarely ever the same. This means that you should optimize for both versions by working them into the visible text on your web pages.

The same can be said for common synonyms. For example, a site selling auto parts would want to optimize for variations on the keyword car parts, such as auto parts and automobile parts…

Looking for the best price on car parts and accessories? You’ve come to the right place. We’re your vehicle’s one stop source for the lowest priced auto parts and accessories. If we don’t have the high quality automobile parts you’re looking for, no one does!
Merged and Hyphenated Words
Be aware that some keywords may be commonly merged or hyphenated. An example of a merged keyword would be web host versus webhost. In some cases, both the merged and unmerged versions will garner about an equal number of searches.

Hyphenated keywords such as ecommerce versus e-commerce should also be taken into account. Remember, search engines will treat them as different keywords. So, if your research suggests you should target both hyphenated and un-hyphenated keywords, be sure to work them both into your web pages and your webpages.

6. Be Descriptive
Once you have covered all the variations of what you expect to be your most important keywords, begin adding descriptive words or words that describe the opposite of what your product does, can work to your advantage.

For instance, cheap, low cost, affordable or inexpensive can go with most consumer products as can superlatives like best pr cheapest. Sometimes using reverse descriptive words or words that describe the opposite of what your product does, can work to your advantage.

For example, if you are selling fast internet connections, then slow internet connection is at lest as good a keyword as fast internet connection since a person typing the query slow internet connection has a problem that they are actively searching to find a solution for.
7. Use Action Words
Try to recreate in your mind how your typical customers conduct their various searches. It is likely that many of them will use action words in their various searches. Word such as: buy, find, or purchase, are examples of action words that are widely used by buyers. Depending on your market, it may be well worth appending these types of words to your primary keywords as such…

buy Motorola i605
find Motorola i605
purchase Motorola i605
best price Motorola i605
free shipping Motorola i605
low price guarantee Motorola i605

Many searchers will also phrase their queries in the form of a question. For instance, the query where can I buy a cell phone actually gets fair amount of traffic. As you grow your keyword list, consider using questions for which your site provides an answer in the form of a solution to their problem.

8. Target Local Markets
If your product or service is geographically sensitive, then be sure to mention the location in the text at every opportunity. For instance, if our motel is in the city of say, Port Angeles, a “normal” sentence might read:

The Uptown Motel boasts an unlimited panoramic view…

A better, keyword laden sentence would be:

The Uptown Motel in Port Angeles boasts an unlimited panoramic view…

Even if the reader already knows it’s in the town of Port Angeles.

When you are selling to a local market, it helps to be familiar with the local idioms and unofficial place names. For example, Philly vs. Philadelphia, Big Apple vs. New York, or Big Island vs. Hawaii (and did you know that people living on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula refer to themselves as Yoopers?)

But don’t leave out official place names. If you sell mobile homes in San Diego, make sure you optimize for California mobile home and san diego mobile home, in addition to social mobile home. You will also probably want to pull in traffic from the surrounding cities and countries, so you could add mission beach mobile homes, la jolla mobile homes, etc… Break out a map and add those relevant place names to your keyword list.
9. Use Online Keyword Tools to Complete Your Selections
Once you have assembled your basic list, you will need to determine relative keyword popularities while, at the same time, enhancing your list by adding keyword terms that you have overlooked. That is where the various online keyword suggestion tools become absolutely indispensable resources.

You should take note; however, that Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) offers a free search term suggestion tool at:

http:/inventory.overture.com/d/serchinventory/suggestion/

Enter any one of your keywords into the query field and you will receive a search count of that keyword within the Yahoo network during the previous month. You will also get a list of related keywords and the frequency with which they queried over that same period of time.

Bear in mind that Yahoo’s tool is notoriously skewed. Their search terms suggestion tool (STST) combines certain terms. For instance, car parts and auto parts show an identical number of searches because Yahoo combines the two terms together as one. It also lumps searches for he singular and plural versions of most key words into one category. For instance, the plural keywords books actually gets far more searches than the singular keyword book, but Yahoos free STST lumps them both under the singular keywords book.

Their reason for the combining terms is related to the fact that they are selling pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Yahoo has a vested interest in convincing their PPC and clients that certain keyword combinations are actually all the same search term. While this is true for PPC search results, it is not true at all within the organic (a.k.a., natural, non-paid) search results for which you are likely to be optimizing your web pages.

One might say that Yahoo is cooking the keyword-count numbers. But the truth is, it depends on your point of view. Your answer is likely to be tempered by your objective: PPC ad buying or organic search results. Yahoo skews their tool toward giving PPC advertisers the kind of keyword counts they think they should be looking at when PPC ad-buying decisions.

Another noticeable problem with Yahoo’s STST is related to the use of automated software that queries keywords with the sole purpose of rank checking and link popularity counts. In other words, these are artificial searches run by auto-bots instead of real people conducting actual searches. Since auto-bot searches get counted in the keyword queries, the keyword counts are skewed even further-especially for many of the more competitive keywords.

In other words, STST’s propensity to merge keyword counts coupled with searches conducted by auto-bots can make keywords look far more popular than they really are.

Now, warning aside. The best use for Yahoo’s STST is to obtain a very quick idea of relative keyword counts between very different keywords. It’s also an excellent source for finding related keywords within a general category that people are actually searching for.

For instance, suppose you are looking for a product to sell. Maybe you would like to determine which is more popular-volleyball or badminton? You are also interested to learn which related keywords people are using when searching each general category and you want to discover the niches associated with each sport.

When searching for additional keywords that searchers are indeed using, Yahoo’s STST provides a useful list complete with relative comparisons. It is the only place on the web where we feel you can trust the accuracy of the keyword frequency data.

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Search Engine Optimization: Robots.txt

Get Your Robots.txt File in Shape

Robots.txt files are used for only one reason to tell search engine spiders which pages not to index. A common misconception is that a robots.txt file can somehow be used to encourage search engines to crawl a site. Not true! Pages that meet the guidelines outlined above are readily spidered by search engines without needing additional encouragement. As you may have noticed, an important part of search engine optimization (SEO) is identifying the elements that cause indexing difficulties for the spiders and eliminating those elements.

So why might you want to tell a search engine not to index some of your pages? Because search engine spiders function with limited time and resources when indexing site, your site will be better served by focusing on getting your important customer-development, product, and sales pages indexed.

Case-in Point: Why would you want a search engine to index your shopping cart? Chances are there is no benefit to you when your shopping cart checkout pages show up in the search engine results. Use a robots.txt file to make sure search engines don’t waste time indexing your shipping cart when they could be using their resources indexing your more important sales or informational content pages.

Other pages you will want to keep search engine spiders away from include anything in your cgi-bin folder as well as directories that contain images or otherwise sensitive company data. Basically, if there isn’t any benefit to having a page (or image) shows up in the search results, then you should hide it from the spiders by using a robots.txt file.

That will not only increase the search engine resources spent on your important pages, but will also have the important side benefit of making your site safer from hackers who may otherwise use search engine results to acquire sensitive information about your company or site. Search engine spiders are pretty voracious about indexing anything they can find on the web, including things like password files, so do be careful.

There is one other issue to be aware of when it comes to robots.txt files. A surprising number of sites have accidentally set up their robots.txt files to prevent search engine spiders from crawling their site.

Did you know that adding the following to lines to your robots.txt file is enough to keep all the major search engines from ever crawling your site?
User-agent:*
Disallow: /

Many people don’t and then wonder why they can’t find their site listed in the search engines. Don’t let this happen to you!

Search Engine Optimization: Using Site Maps

Site Maps for Large Sites
If you have a large site, you may be wondering whether it is better to create one large site map or several smaller site maps. There are a couple of factors to consider: First, search engines generally only index the first 101K of HTML code. Second, 100 links on page is generally considered to be the maximum limit for a spider to crawl (exceptions will be made for very popular pages, but to be safe, use as the upper limit on the number of links on page).

Therefore, if your entire site is fewer than 100 pages and you can create a site map page smaller in file size than 101K, then it is beneficial to use only one site map that points a search engine spider to the rest of your site.

There is an advantage to having only one site map placed within the root domain. It enables the search engine spider to find and index all of your pages without having to traverse your site any deeper than two links beyond your home page one link from your home page to your site map, then one more from your site map to every other page on your site. This makes it easiest for the spider to find every page on your site.

However, once a site map approaches 100 or so links, or the file size of your site map webpage approaches 10k (excluding images), then it is time to start splitting up your site map into mini site maps. It is suggested that you link to each site map from your home page – five site maps, for example, would require five links from the homepage instead of one. The end result would be that a spider would still only need to follow a maximum of two links deep beyond your homepage to reach all your pages.

If, for some reason, it is not practical to place all five links to your five site maps on the home page, then we would suggest a single link on the home page that points to a master site map which, in turn, contains the five links to the five smaller site maps. That would require the search engine spider to travel three links deep into your site to locate and index all of your pages, which is still quite good. And again, link to your site maps from all your pages, not just your home page.

Finally, we recommend avoiding forcing a spider to crawl any deeper that three links beyond your page to locate the rest of you pages. Using the site structure outline above should allow you to easily accomplish that objective.

Search Engine Optimization: Introduction

Three Easy Steps to dominating the search engines

1. Build a site that is easy for search engines to find and process (Search engine friendly site).
2. Collect the search words that customers will be using to find your site, and incorporate those words into your web pages (find the right keywords).
3. Get important web sites similar in topic to your own to link to you, so that search engines know your site is an important destination (inbound links).

To put it simply… Keywords tell search engines what your page is about and inbound links tell search engines that your page is important. Links identify your site as important and are the key factor in determining exactly where your pages will rank in the search engines. Although the keywords found on your website are a critical part search engine optimization, their direct effect on ranking is limited, inbound links-and the keywords found within those links-actually have a far greater effect on ranking than the keywords found on the actual website.

Designing Search-Friendly Web Pages: There are two important points to remember about search engines:

1. The first is…The quality of your site counts. Search engines make their money through advertising. Showing ads to their users is their profit model, and the more users they have, the more money they make. The way search a search engine gets more users is by giving them the best search results. This means that if your site is the most useful site to customers in your category, then search engines want to rank you highly. Indeed, their livelihood depends on it. 2. The second thing to remember is…Search engines are computer programs. More precisely, search engines run a program called a spider than downloads your web pages, reads the text and links on those web pages, and decides what to do with your pages based on that information. This is known as crawling. Search engine spiders are computer programs that crawl web pages.

Employ a Flat Directory Structure In general, the flatter your site’s directory structure, the better your chances of getting more of your pages spidered. In other words, pages that are several subdirectory levels deep will often get spidered less frequently. For example, consider the depth of the web page at the following URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/stuff/articles/2006/05/pages.htm

A page that deep should generally not expect to be easily indexed or rank highly in any search engine. Expectations maybe made for popular sites with lots of incoming links, but any web page buried that deep puts itself a ranking disadvantage. It is not uncommon to use directories to organize the structure of a site. That is because a flat directory structure-one that places all the pages only tow or three levels deep-is very difficult to logically organize. If the structure of your site dictates that you must utilize deep subdirectories, then it becomes even more important to utilize a strategically placed site map.

Note: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! If you have already established your directory structure and your pages are ranking well, don’t change anything! You are doing fine, and moving pages without telling search engines where they went can get those pages deleted from the search listings. If you want to set up a flat directory structure in order to boost your rankings, be sure to redirect your pages to their new location so that engines (and your customers) can find your new pages.