Getting the right keywords

Good content and good design are not enough if you want your website to be fruitful, what are equally important are the keywords in the content. You miss out on the keywords and you loose business. With SEO having emerged as the most happening new method of internet marketing, keywords come popping out as the most important tool for SEO. Keywords are what will get you traffic from search engines, and this traffic can kick your business in the right direction with the revenue stream flowing in.

Key words are those words which summarize your website. These could be words related to the products or services you offer. These are the major words which most internet users would use to find information on the search engines. This is how they generate additional traffic and thus revenue to your site.

Dont go paranoid about how and from where to search these keywords, they are easy to find and develop. When you are making content for your website this is one important aspect which one cannot afford to overlook. If you have ignored this aspect you have failed in your marketing efforts. The choice of the right type of key words will determine how much traffic you get to your site and more importantly how will the revenue figures change. If your key word are well chosen you will see an increase in the traffic as also the number of buyers, while if your choice is not correct you may get lots of visitors to your site but they may not mean any business to you. Being in your respective trade you should be able to figure out a few of the words which are commonly used, so just list around some five to ten words which you feel are the real essence of your business. These words should focus around the main product or service or the main business idea behind your site. If the number of products is very large you could choose the few which get you the maximum business or you may use the category titles. Once that basic list is with you, here is how you must develop further on the idea.

• Now do a bit of search on what complementary products or services do buyers tend to buy which you may not be offering. This will give you a list of some more keywords which may be more effective than the ones you think are the main ones. The advantage with these keywords is that there would be less competition for these keywords on the search engines and also they may have the power to generate more specific buyers. So your list has now gained more additions.

• Its time to get online and use some of the free tools on the web to find out the search frequency for each of the keywords on your list, also to know what other variations of your keywords are used by net users. The free tools include Search term suggestion tool by Overture and the other one being Adword suggestions tool by Google. If you think you can spend a bit of money you could use the Word Tracker which is known to provide you with a better list of keywords, along with other related keywords. This tool will be most beneficial for those who are in a niche market. At this point of time may be you want to sign up for some pay per click programs with the major search engines and test and evaluate the keywords you have chosen. Participating in pay per click also will help you to add on more words to your keyword list as all PPC programs offer suggestions on keywords. Within a few weeks you will be having the most appropriate and highly targeted keyword. Then you can start including them in your content pages to improve your Search engine optimization.

• Another thing that could help is if you are doing business in a specific geographical region then this must also be added to your keyword list. The name of your state, region or country must also feature in the search phrases that you design.

• It will help if you check on your competitor websites to find out what keywords are getting them business, to find the keywords you can check the Meta tags which might contain the keywords. This will help you add some more weight-age to your list.

• If you are hosting your site with a good hosting company, they would have the facility for you to analyze your website log files, which can help you to analyze the web traffic to your site. The hosting companies may either have the facility for you to log into your account to find the traffic reports or you may be sent the report by mail. The report would contain data on what search terms were used by visitors and which search engines were used to carry out the search. To retrieve more information from these reports you could also make use of some software which has been designed for this specific purpose some names are urchins and webtrends.

All this done you will have a list of the most effective keywords which will definitely increase both the traffic to your site and the revenue from your site. The list you will arrive at will contain highly targeted keywords and key-phrases; an all you have to do is use these words in the content on your site. But use them justifiably, dont over clutter your content with these making the content difficult for the reader to read and understand.