Choosing your keywords to maximise visitors

A friend called me the other day saying they were over the moon because they are number 1 in Google. "Great I said...for what search term?", he began to reel off a 6 word phrase that, when I searched, only had 72 other competing listings in Google - and was searched upon just once a month on average!

The moral here is to ensure that the search term (or keywords) you are optimising for will bring you plenty of targeted visitors. This being said, you need to ensure the keywords you are choosing are not too difficult to achieve for a beginner.

When planning any kind of optimisation the first two things to consider are; 'Are my keywords ever searched upon?' and 'Are my keywords too out of reach for my site?'.

To answer the first question we can use the handy Overture Search Tool, visit < a onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggesti on/">http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestio n/ - and type in your keyword/s. This will tell you how many searches were carried out on your keyword/s during the previous month on Yahoo, MSN, Wanadoo, Lycos and AltaVista (to calculate the searches in Google take this figure and multiply by four - this is not an exact representation but gives a good estimation). Not only will it show you the number of times your keyword/s have been searched upon but it also displays similar alternative keywords, plus the number of searches for these too. This is a great tool not only to examine your own keywords but also gives you popular alternatives.

The next thing to consider is, ‘are my keywords out of reach'. As you can imagine there are millions of websites targeting popular keywords. For example, at this moment there are over 456million websites targeting the keyword 'shopping' in Google. With this many sites fighting for a sought after keyword it is virtually impossible to obtain a top or even first page listing and would at the very least take years of work.

To see how many websites are competing for a chosen keyword is to visit Google, perform a search and the result is shown at the top right of each Google search page (e.g. Results 1-10 of about 1,456,732 for ‘keyword' - would mean 1,456,732 are competing for this keyword).

If you find your keyword has millions of competitors then try being more specific. For example, if you ran a website promoting a small car dealers, the keyword ‘car dealers' would present 44.6million competitors on Google. Now for starters it would be very difficult to try to gain a first page listing for this term for a beginner and also this keyword is generic to the entire country. If you were selling cars from a small dealers in Dover then it wouldn't be of much use to someone in searching for ‘Car Dealers' who is based in Glasgow.

Now if we type in the search term of ‘Car Dealers in Dover' in to Google we have not only reduced our competition down to 479,000 but also our market is more targeted to people living in the same town as our business - and who are more likely to visit.

For a website beginning its search engine optimisation campaign your competition should be around 500,000 websites or less, with a targeted time of 1-3 months to see some positive results.

Now after you have found your optimum keywords by using the above method, you need to add these to your site. The first method is adding them to the beginning of your Title tags e.g. (covered in the first newsletter). The title tag is the most important in the eyes of search engines - but don't overdo it. You should only use you keyword/s twice or three times maximum in your title tag and importantly each title on each of you web pages should be different.

Secondly you need to use this same keyword throughout your home page and site. The most commonly asked question is how many times should this be added - well it's best to ensure your keyword/s make up around 4-6% of all text within your page and spread evenly throughout the site, i.e. only once per paragraph.

After this the most important action to take is monitor your progress!