2. Key Words
This is the most crucial
part of your promotion strategy. If you choose the wrong keywords, no
amount of submitting or page alteration will bring you the quality and
amount of traffic that will produce sales of your product.
2.1 Building Your List
Open your plain text editor and list your keywords and keyword phrases,
one on each line. Once you have a list, rearrange them in order of
priority, the most important ones at the top.
2.2 The Strategy:
Targeted vs Blanket
This is something you have to decide right from the beginning. It's
quite simple. If you have a large list of keywords, your pages will be
found with a broad spectrum of search strings, but they're less likely
to be at the top of the results lists (blanket strategy). If you use a
limited number of keywords, it increases the density of those few
keywords and therefore puts them high up the list (targeted strategy).
So, if your keyword list
is naturally short (ie. you're confident that users will search for
these above all others) then the target strategy is for you. If you have
a long list of products, then the blanket method is for you.
2.3 Empathy With Your
Customers
Imagine that you're one of the people who's looking for your type of
product. If you had to put a search string into a form, what would it
be? The most obvious words are the ones you want to use. If you have to
think too hard you'll probably come up with an obscure word that nobody
else would think of searching for, which defeats the object.
Important:
It doesn't matter whether or not you actually sell the product! Don't
limit yourself by thinking "What do I sell?" Instead, put
yourself in your customers' shoes and ask yourself "What problems
and needs is my product solving?" For example, if you're selling
massage oils, "sports injuries" would be a good keyword
phrase which you wouldn't have thought of if you'd simply browsed a
list of your products for inspiration.
2.4 Plurals
When you've completed your keywords list, add the letter 's' to the end
of every word (or add the plural of the word to the list in the case of
words like cactus/cacti). Many people search for 'games' or 'hotels' and
if your keywords are in the singular your page won't be listed and your
efforts will have been wasted, whereas your page will be listed in a
search for the singular. A search for 'hotel' will find your keyword
'hotels' for example.
2.5 Common words
Avoid words which have a lot to do with the Net in general. When a user
searches for one of these words they get a huge number of results and
yours is likely to be way down the list.
The purpose of keywords
is to target words that will bring people to your site as opposed to
other people's. Since nearly every site on the Net is to do with 'web'
or 'Internet' or 'services', using these words to target your audience
is pretty pointless.
Most of the robot-driven
engines actively ignore common words like this.
2.6 Mispelings
If any of your keywords are routinely mis-spelled, include the incorrect
version in your keyword list. If you're selling satellite TV dishes,
include 'sattelite' on your list.
2.7 Keyword Phrases
These days there are so many pages on the Web that users usually search
for 'strings' of at least two or three related words at once, for
example "california carpet fitters". Now, if you have all
three words on your list separately, you'll be listed below somebody
else's page if they've targeted all three words together, in a Keyword
Phrase. In the above example you would treat "california carpet
fitters" as one word which just happens to have space characters in
it.
2.8 Test Your Keywords
Now keep your list handy, visit all the major search engines and enter
your keywords one by one to see what comes up in the search results
list. Study a few of the top pages which will have a similar topic to
yours, and see if there are any other good keywords you could add to
your list which you hadn't thought of before. Don't feel guilty about
'cheating', this is common practice.
Don't be tempted to paste
the code from the top listings straight onto your page. If you get into
the habit of doing that type of thing you'll always be following others
and picking up the scraps. The aim is to get ahead of others, and that
means being original. That applies to your business in general, not just
your promotion strategy.
2.9 The Voyeurs
There are several places you can go to watch users inputting search
strings in "real time".
The following page will
open in a new browser:
