Drasky

Marketing and optimizing a website for search engines is a broad topic. There are many factors to consider when heading out with the goal of improving your website’s visibility and ranking within various search engines. In part one I will discuss the highly requested topic of website keywords. In follow-up articles I will cover additional topics such as page ranking, pay-per-click advertising campaigns, the marketing techniques to avoid, and the latest analysis technologies including eye tracking software.

Choosing the correct keywords for a web site is an crucial and enlightening research task. In the process of improving your website you’ll learn a lot about your industry and your competitors.

Keywords are one the main factors that come into play in the algorithms used by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search. If a web surfer is looking for home decorating tips and types ‘home decorating’ into a search engine, it will search its database for websites that contain that phrase and those individual words.

Selecting the correct keywords

If you are an proficient in your line of business, you know what your customers are looking for. Specifically, you know which of the words and phrases your clients would use to search for your products and services. Start with what you know.

Write out a list of phrases and words that describe your business. If you have a home decorating business you may think of words like ‘interior design’ and ‘furnishings’. Sort your list so that the most common phrases are on the top of your list.

You will now want to cross-reference the list of keywords that you have compiled with other lists generated for your industry. This will bring out other keywords that you may not have thought of previously. I recommend using a popular web-based keyword research tool named Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com). Wordtracker helps identify additional keywords and phrases and offers a free trial of their service. It provides only a limited number of related words, but is still a great starting point. Probing for related keywords for ‘home decorating’ with Wordtracker produces a listing of keywords similar ‘home’, ‘decor’, ‘decorating’, ‘home decor’, ‘furniture’, ‘design’, ‘interior’, ‘interior decorating’, ‘art’, ‘wall’, and ‘fabric’.

Other keyword tools, which produce similar results, are also available. These include, among others, the web-based tools provided by Yahoo (Overture) (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), and Google (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

After the compilation and reconciling the various lists of key words, you can move on to the next step.

Using the right keywords on your web site

Now that you have a good idea of which key words web surfers may type into search engines to find your business or products, you must ensure your website contains these important key words.

A strategy is mandatory when updating your web site to include the keywords in your list. Starting at the beginning of your list, you should review the keywords. Determine which of these key words would normally be present on your web site and which of these key words you probably wouldn’t use. Using the first list of keywords, you may now start reviewing the different sections of your website.

Your selected keywords should be placed in various areas of your site with the proper frequency. The web site content should focus on making sense to your visitors, not filledwith keywords that could improve your search engine positioning. Search engine algorithms easily detects the over use of key words, which will negatively affect your search engine position. Let’s go ahead and look at different areas of your web site.

Web site Title

Every website has a title. This is not a website logo or a bold heading found on the top section of a website. This refers to the web site title displayed in the web browser’s title bar. This is the top most area of the window located to the far left of the window’s minimize, maximize, and close buttons. The web site title is also the information displayed in search results, which is in a larger font and underlined. The web site title is the first thing that a web surfer sees when reviewing search results. Web surfers quickly scan through search result website titles to evaluate which website will meet their needs. This is your first opportunity to grab their attention.

A website title should contain as many of your keywords as possible, while maintaining easy readability. This will do two things for you. First, the search engine will find your web site in its database and display your web site in their search results. Second, the website title will catch the surfer’s interest as they see their search criteria matching your website title. Over-stuffing the website title with key words makes the title hard to read and may be seen as abuse by search engines spiders. The web site title is updated by inserting text located between the opening and closing title tags, in the header of the HTML code (Page Title). The title length should be restricted to very little words. The web site description tags allows more room for describing your products and services.

Web site Description

As with the website title, the website description should also contain a variety of keywords. Unlike the website title, the website description is not visible on any part of the website itself. The description is the summary information you see in search engines results, displayed below the website title. The website description gives you a little more space to describe your website and your products and services. Once again, be certain that your description is easily readable for your visitors, in order to draw in them to click your web site title. The website description can be updated by changing the text in the description meta tag, in the header of the HTML code ().

Web site Keywords

Along with the title and description entries in the HTML code, there is as well an area to define a set of keywords that you’d like to link to the page. This is aptly called the key word meta tag or description. Key words are entered as a csv or comma separated list, as follows (). The industry consensus is that the keyword meta tag is currently of little or no use with today’s major search engines. Nevertheless, search engines proceed to recommend their usage.

Website Content

This brings us to the meat of our website, so to speak. Our elect keywords should be used throughout the web site content where it makes common sense. Again, over-stuffing page content with keywords so that the message is unnatural can be detected by search engines. A good practice is to use the keywords to make the page content more descriptive. For instance, a pet store may trade a assortment of pet foods. This can be written in a descriptive style, such as, ‘dog solid food and cat food’, rather of using ‘dog and cat food’. In this illustration the keyword ‘food’ is used twice.

Headings and Hyperlinks

Special attention should be given to the usage of heading (This is a Heading) tags and anchor tags (click here). Keyword usage in page heading is more valuable than keywords used in a paragraph of text. The same can be said with anchor tags (a.k.a. hyperlinks) – Text Links. Using keywords as the clickable text of a hyperlink is very valuable.

Keyword Density

Keyword denseness refers to the portion of occurrences of your keywords compared to the other textual matter on the web page. Keyword concentration tools such as Webconfs.com’s Keyword Density Checker (http://webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) provides a visualization of the main theme or message on a chosen page. The tool determines the number of times each word is repeated on a page, which is a test of how you’ve done at inserting keywords to optimize the content. It is also a good representation of how search engines will see your page. ‘More is better’ is not the most effective keyword density goal. Although the optimal keyword denseness is much debated, having some balance is decidedly in order. A keyword density below 1% makes it hard for a search engine to understand your main message, where a density over 5% will start to make the content appear unnatural. At this stage in website optimization, the page content can be continually edited while the keyword density is being re-checked. Continue the process until your key words are amongst the words with the highest density.

Conclusion

Choosing the right keywords for your web site is a must. Website keyword optimization is not rocket science, but it must be implemented carefully. By using the right keywords, not only will your site be positioned well in search results, but it will draw in visitors to your web site.