One of the key skills you need to develop when undertaking search engine optimization is the ability to identify and choose keywords that your customers are going to use, or should I say, likely to use to visit your website or search in a search. . engine. There are many great tools out there to help you find the right keywords, but keep in mind that you always test the results you get because there are anomalies in some of these tools that can cost you time and money. I want to go through a series of steps to take to prove that you have the right keywords.
There are a variety of tools you can use to determine which keywords will be most appropriate for your market, some of them are free, some you have to sign up for, and some you have to pay for. Tools include –
1.Word Tracker
2.Google AdWords
3. Opening
4. Free keywords
5. Your Website Session Logs
6. Yahoo Advertising
7. Keyword Finder
8. Keyword Elite
9. Good keywords
10. Competitor Websites
Before investing in the keywords you have found, always check if the keyword is as popular as the resources tell you for that search.
Because?
I recently had a situation where a keyword we found “advanced wealth planning techniques” was supposed to get 250 hits a day from Google. We got this information from a variety of different sources, however we found that this was not the case, in fact those keywords prior to writing this article actually only get 2-5 hits per day.
One of the biggest lessons my team and I learned from this was to make sure to run a keyword test on pay-per-click programs before purchasing any domains that use the keywords to ensure that the keywords actually get the traffic from keyword tools. The way my team achieves this is that we will create the sales pages for the product or service we want to sell and test it on the key search engine we want to optimize the new website for using one of our existing websites.
For example, if we know that a certain keyword will get the most traffic on Google, we will surely use AdWords to prove that the traffic actually exists. If we knew that Yahoo was the top source of traffic for the keywords, then we would use Overture.
Usually we will test the keywords for 2-3 days. Longer tests may be necessary, but two to three days is usually a good indicator. Once we’re sure the keywords are getting the volume of traffic we’re looking for, we’ll stop advertising, secure the domain name, and then deploy our products on that domain and optimize web pages for that product or service. This ensures that we are not trapped in a situation that we have been in in the past, where we have a domain name that contains keywords that are totally useless.
The best tool I have found to quickly test your keywords is Google Adwords. One of the main reasons I like using this resource is that you can test your keywords right away instead of waiting up to 5 days anywhere on the other pay-per-click engines like Overture.
One of the other ways we look to see if the keywords we’ve chosen are really worth looking at is to look at what our competitors are doing. However, use this technique simply as a guide because they could be making the same mistakes you are. We know of some people who copied what we were doing with the keywords mentioned above and would not have gotten traffic from those keywords the way we did.
The key to success in any business, whether online or in the offline world, is testing and measuring. The way we test to make sure keywords are being used is to check our logs and see who is referring traffic to our site. In the ASP code there are a number of session values that will contain this information. We check our sites every day to make sure traffic is coming from our target keywords.
If they are not coming from the keywords we are targeting and customers buy our products, we will look at the keywords that are being used and find out how competitive they are and if we should optimize our site for those keywords. Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing is really a science, and like all science, you need facts and figures to make decisions, so the more quality statistics you can collect, the easier it is to make a change of direction.
For example, we recently had a situation where we started getting a couple hundred hits per day for a 5 word statement that was being used by both Google and Yahoo to find our site. While a couple hundred hits a day might not sound like a lot, our conversion rate on that key statement was around 70%, which is huge for any internet business. The weird part was that our website actually ranked #97 in search engine results for both Google and Yahoo!
What we did at this point was simply write a series of articles on keyword topics. Please submit articles to related sites, including article directories, and then make sure that in the Author Bio section we include a hypertext that includes the keyword statement on the associated page. The result was that we increased our ranking from 97 to the top 5 and got a 70% conversion rate on all people who visited that web page.
The key thing though is to make sure that the keywords you are using are the ones your buyers associate with. Sometimes I find that a customer’s perception of what keywords a person would use to search for a product is much more different than what their customers actually use. Every time we look at that issue, we just go back to customer records for the last 6 months and look at the data and find out how your customers are finding it.
The secret to search engine optimization for any website is in the logs, as they will tell you very clearly what people use to get to your site, and even more so, what search engines they use.
When you’re looking to buy a new domain or create a new site, be sure to do your homework to identify the right keywords that people will use to find your products or services. Before you commit to buying a new domain containing your keywords, always test to see that the keywords are actually being used and that there is enough volume to justify the purchase.
Remember, the reason we test and measure is to make sure you’re making a sound investment. If you’re wrong, you’ll have to spend more money to correct your mistake, and no one likes having to spend their hard-earned money.
