“It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.” ~ Tom Brokaw ~

Selection of keywords

If you choose the wrong keywords, you will get the wrong visitors to your site and your efforts will be wasted. Or probably worse, the search engines won’t rank you high and you’ll get very little visitors at all. So how are the right keywords chosen?

Keyword selection normally begins with the words you imagine people will type into the search box to find your website. Therefore, think carefully about what keywords people are most likely to use to find your site. Make a list of individual words and then combine them into phrases. Visit various search engines and conduct searches for a variety of your keywords and key-phrases to see what results are returned.

Specific not general
Say your website specialises in selling Macromedia Dreamweaver software. Although the keyword ‘software’ has heaps of traffic, the people who type in this keyword aren't nearly as pre-qualified to purchase from you as people who search on ‘Dreamweaver’ and better still ‘buy Macromedia Dreamweaver.

If you search on the keyword ‘software’ at any search engine, there will be potentially millions of sites listed. Many people make the mistake of targeting very general keywords and get frustrated when they don’t rank highly. Be realistic when selecting keywords, to give you the best chance of achieving good rankings. Statistically, most people use two- to three-word combinations to avoid getting too many unrelated results returned. Your target keywords should therefore always be at least two or more words long. Specific keywords and key-phrases bring targeted visitors. The more specific your keywords, the more likely your visitors will find what they are looking for at your website, and the more likely those who respond will be those you are targeting.

Word stemming
Most leading search engines, including Google, use word stemming. This is where searches for a word will also display results using variations of that word. For example, a search with ‘cheapest’ is likely to return documents that have the words ‘cheap’ and ‘cheaper’ (unless the user chooses to perform an exact search). This will allow you to reduce the number of words in your Meta tags and on your page. When selecting keywords and key-phrases, always choose the longer form of the word.

Niches & Misspellings
It is very difficult to earn a top ten result for many keywords that are extremely competitive. Don’t despair – get creative. Savvy marketers look for a niche that few others are targeting, and go after it.

Normally it is better to first dominate a smaller market online,
than be buried in a larger one.

Misspelled keywords can also be worth investigating. Give thought to your keywords and see if visitors frequently misspell them, like ‘Dreamweever’ for example. If they do, consider using them in your keyword tags, so your visitors don’t read them on the page and think of them as errors.

Regional
Even though the Internet allows you to reach people globally, when someone is searching, they normally prefer to buy products & services and source information on a more local level. By adjusting your key-phrase to ‘buy Macromedia Dreamweaver Melbourne’ for example, you can attract more targeted visitors who are more likely to buy from you locally, than a supplier on the other side of the world. Give thought to the regional significance in your offering and optimise for it to give you an advantage over your competitors that don’t.

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