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A keyword in an
Internet search is one of the words used to find matching web pages. Keyword
optimization, the art of choosing the correct keywords, is one of the most
important things related to search engine optimization. Sadly, it's also
one of the things people tend to spend too little time on. They think up a
few keywords quickly, optimize their pages a bit and then submit them to the
engines. This usually results in not-so-good rankings under keywords that
are poorly related to the site in question. Before
you start optimizing your site for the search engines, you should spend some
time in figuring out exactly what keywords, or what key phrases, you are
going to target. Search engines are an excellent source of traffic, but in
order to utilize them to their full potential, some effort is required. |
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What you
should do is not to rush things. Sit down, open up your favorite text editor
in one window and your site in another. Read through the first page of your
site. When you have read it, stop to think. What is this page about? Which
of the words that appear in the document describe the contents of the page
accurately? What kind of words or phrases would someone use if he was using
a search engine and trying to find documents like this? When you
have found the answers to these questions, write down the words and the
phrases you have come up with. It doesn't matter if the list becomes too
long, as you can always remove some of the excess words later.
Select
one or two medium-popular keywords or phrases per page. These are main
targets, and optimize heavily for them. Then squeeze a few less common
phrases and words into the body text, hoping that they will help the page to
come up on some obscure multi-word searches.
Repeat
this process for every page on site. You should be able to create an
individual, distinct list of keywords for each page. The different lists
should not "compete" with each other, instead each should cover different
areas. This does not however mean that there shouldn't be any similarities
between your lists - it's perfectly OK to have some, but the lists shouldn't
be 100% identical. It is better to have 20 good listings on different search
terms than 20 good listings on the same one. The next
thing would be to go to Overture's (GoTo) keyword suggestion tool and type
in the different keywords and phrases you've come up with. The tool will
tell you how many times each keyword and each phrase was searched at
Overture during the last month. It won't tell you exactly how popular
different words are, since the statistics contain only the searches executed
at Overture, but it will give you a general idea. Because
Overture's data is not always 100% accurate, you may also want to visit
WordTracker. The service is not free, but the trial option offers a chance
to search for good keywords without having to pay a dime. By using both
Overture and WordTracker and comparing what they think about the popularity
of different keywords, you should be able to separate the words people
search for from those that are rarely used.
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