TopWebSite Search Engines Guide

Keywords

Choosing keywords is one of the core activities when implementing a search engines placement strategy. A #1 position for a keyword or phrase nobody uses is worthless, while a 2nd page position on a popular phrase can be like gold. The first stage in deciding which phrases to target is to brainstorm words and phrases which are relevant to your business. Ask colleagues, friends and employees what words they associate with your business and what phrases they would expect to use to find your site on a search engine. Collate this list into a master list on a spreadsheet, for use later in Wordtracker.

Next keywords step is to identify what phrases are used by other similar web sites to attract visitors. input some of the main phrases you already have into a search engine and look at the sites which are returned in the results. Using View Source to see their page code you will be able to identify the 'Meta Keywords' tag near the top of the page and identify generic phrases which may be appropriate for your site. Do not copy code or trade mark names from other sites. Add any keywords identified to your master list.

A good keywords tool for identifying further potential keywords is Wordtracker which does this work for you by identifying similar sites, extracting their keywords and sorting them for you.

Once you have a list of potential keywords for your site it makes sense to grade them to enable you to pick the best. We use 3 indicators which combine to give the best phrases to target which consists of checking each phrase for

• How popular is the phrase using the GoTo Keyword Tool which shows the number of searches for that phrase in the previous month.
• The competitiveness of the phrase using the number of pages targeting that phrase at AltaVista.
• The market value of the phrase using the cost price of the #1 position at GoTo, a pay per click search engine.

We then combine the results to identify those keywords likely to give the best return, the ideal being a phrase which is used a lot, but has little competition and a low click cost.

Condensing the master keyword list into 10 or 12 phrases which best sum up the business gives you the best keywords to use for your web site.