Choosing the Best Keywords to Steer Traffic to Your Website

If you are like your neighbor who owns a website, you would like your site to show in the top ten of Google search results. Regrettably, only very few people have the knowledge to actually achieve it. You've got to do a number of things in order to be found for keywords associated with your web site. Moreover, taking your time to research the best possible keywords for your site is a significant step on the ladder.

Many webmasters make the slip-up of assuming that a ranking for one generic term related to their website will turn their website into a commercial success. Although that one generic term may supply a good flow of traffic and brand appreciation, this doesn't imply the visitors to your site will be targeted traffic that will make purchases or even sign up for your newsletter. And the costs of targeting that term will likely tower over your return on investment. You should target various keywords linked with the benefits of your product or the difficulties your product solves. This will not only drive traffic, but also lead to a significant amount of conversion.

The first thing you need to consider is who your prospects are and the benefits they will receive for visiting your website. Do you sell products online? Do you offer services? Is your website more content focused? What would visitors see as their benefit for coming to your web site? By understanding your potential visitors and the reasons they will come to your site you will better focus your efforts on important keywords.

With this in mind, you can now consider the benefit or problem related terms that you believe people will use in searches to find your website. You shouldn't be satisfied with just one term. This is a snare that many webmasters fall into when they assume that one term will provide enough visitors to maintain their business. And they are taken aback that their business doesn't increase if they do achieve that ranking. Think about all of the promising phrases and themes of your site, even draw on a thesaurus to locate associated terms. You can also check rival websites for ideas. It can be surprising just what words and phrases your prospective visitors will be using!

Once you have assembled your list of relevant keywords, you'll need to check some web resources to determine how popular and competitive those terms are. Next, you'll begin to refine those keywords to be highly targeted to your web site's purpose.

To start out you'll determine how widely used your keywords are. This job can be completed using a number of keyword suggestion tools.

Keyword suggestion tools let you know which words and phrases were typed into searches, and the number of searches that were conducted using those terms. Typing a phrase in the tool will return a variety of other phrases that include your keyword, alternative suggestions with a similar meaning and also an estimation of how much traffic each phrase provides per month. These tools can be inconsistent as they query different search engines and the traffic estimations can be imprecise, but they are still helpful for getting a ball park estimate of the number of searches conducted, and for suggesting several words and phrases you may never have thought of targeting.

Google's AdWords Keyword Tool, located at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is free to use and provides a list of suggested words and phrases as well as the quantity of searches performed on Google.

A similar tool is located at http://www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the metacrawlers Dogpile and Metacrawler. So the numbers may not be illustrative of what is being searched on the web as a whole. But Wordtracker is still beneficial for suggesting alternative phrases and associated keywords. Wordtracker is not a free resource. Wordtracker offers monthly or annual subscriptions.

Trellian's KeywordDiscovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com is a comparative newcomer to the keyword suggestion marketplace. KeywordDiscovery can query multiple search engines worldwide and produces similar results to Wordtracker as well as other services, but with prices starting at $69.95 per month. You can try this resource for free but you'll receive only a subset of the results you would receive as a paid member.

Next, you'll need to find out how competitive your keywords are. Ideally you want to find keywords that have high volume traffic but not many websites contending to rank for that keyword. You can use numerous tricks to determine this. Competitive pages that are optimized for a term will at least have that keyword in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site. So by going to Google and using the queries entitled:"phrase here" and inanchor:"phrase here", you can find how many other pages have been optimized for your chosen phrase. The smaller the results for these searches, the less competition there is for the term. For more information about what these Google advanced search operators do, visit http://google.about.com/od/googlepowersearches/Google_Power_Searches.htm.

After using these resources you'll have a list of keywords that are significantly more targeted than your earliest keywords. These phrases can include breaking your term down by geographical position, or a specific product. You will be able to optimize your website for multiple phrases - remember that search engines index each of your pages and not just websites. That means all of the pages in your site can be found in search engines, which in turn means all of those pages can be optimized for different keywords!

Many people are also optimizing pages for "long tail" keyword phrases. These are very specific multi word phrases that are use infrequently in searches, but are so precise they can end up being the most targeted terms and carry with them higher conversion rates. In order to include long tails phrases you must have a content rich site - the more content you have the more opportunities you have to include obscure terms that can appear somewhere on your site.

So you should now at last have a list of the most desired targeted phrases for your website! It should be clear now that the practice of choosing your terms isn't something that can be considered quickly. There is a lot of work to do if you seek to optimize the ability of your website to draw organic search traffic. With your final list you will now be ready to optimize your pages to be found for those words and phrases, but that is a new subject.