Tips for Choosing Keywords for your Website
by Suzanne E Morrison
A very important skill of internet marketing is how to choose
keywords for your website. Most people don't know how to do this
and if you fail with this it can cost you traffic and money.
Here are some tips to help you learn how to choose keywords for
your website.
Choose your niche. Once you have decided on your niche you can
then start to research your keywords. It shouldn't be too hard
to come up with a keyword that describes your niche. For
instance if you want to advertise for pest control, your main
keywords would be pest control. Not too hard, but the problem
here is many other sites are probably already ranked in Google
for pest control, so you need to find keywords that are relevant
to your niche and still get several keywords a month.
A lot of marketers use the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index). It
isn't perfect but what it does is figures how much competition
you have compared to how many monthly searches there are. The
formula looks like this: (S^2/C) which means the number of
searches times 2, then divided by the number of competitors.
Usually the number is included on paid keyword tools. Not
everyone goes by this number because it can sometimes be
misleading if there are a small number of searches or
competitors, so it is wise to check the actual searches and the
actual competitors before you decide on a keyword to target.
If you can find a good number 50+ searches a day (the more the
better) and there is a KEI over 4 you should be able to target
this keyword. You should start by choosing some keywords in your
niche. If all the keyword phrases have the same root keyword
phrase then this will help. However more internet marketers are
learning to find more broad keywords in order to get more
searches, because long tail keywords often get so little
traffic. An example of this is the pest control niche would be:
getting rid of ants (or mice).
If you can go through and find several broad keywords to target
different pages of your site on then you will be able to find
which page gets the most traffic and later on you can find the
long tail keywords that go with each broad keyword.
Another excellent way to get keyword ideas is to use some free
keyword research tools. The free tools on Google Keyword Tool
and Free Wordtracker are very helpful and show you how many
searches there are for keywords. The Google Adwords keyword
research tool will also suggest lots of related keywords that
can help to give you more ideas. After you find out the number
of searches, check on the search engine for the number of
competitors, if you have a lot of searches (over 500) a month
and few competitors (under 10k) you have a doable keyword.
There are always advances in keyword research so it is good to
have a place where you will be notified of any keyword related
tools. Most internet marketing forums should be useful for this.
About the author:
Keyword research & SEO course by email. Download Suzanne's SEO
