Determining Search Engine Keywords

Search engines are the vehicles that steer potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination - your website - you need to provide them with specific and efficient signs that will guide them right to your site. You do this by developing carefully selected keywords.

Think of the correct keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the perfect right words or phrases, and presto, plenty of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too generic or too over-used, the possibility of visitors truly making it all the way to your site - or of seeing any real advantages from the visitors that do arrive - decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the basis of your marketing method. If they are not picked with large precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the appropriate people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your technique is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the appropriate words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven't followed particular steps, you are likely WRONG. It's hard to be objective when you are right in the middle of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most effective keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many possible customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers' understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is a precious resource. You will locate the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The goal of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will guide the highest amount of valuable visitors to your website. By valuable visitors I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just browse around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the simplest to judge because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL. You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a numeric ranking based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The greater the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine ranking you will need to achieve. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn't enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more certain your keyword is, the larger the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will locate you.

Let's look at a potential instance. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword "automobile companies." However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword "automobile body shops" would rank lower on the popularity scale than "automobile companies," but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of recieving loads of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with ruined front ends or ruined fenders being guided to your site. In other words, consumers ready to purchase your services are the ones who will immediately locate you. Not only that, but the larger the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer reason. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to determine out what reason prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a certain word or phrase. Let's look at another example, such as a consumer who is looking for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to determine between "Seattle job listings" and "Seattle IT recruiters" which do you think will assist the consumer more? If you were looking for this sort of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the required experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until you locate the most particular and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have picked your keywords, your work is not done. You must constantly evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular language. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors really made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that looks at consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This permits you to decide which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a satisfactory keyword; advantages per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who really purchase your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important matter in evaluating the efficiency of a keyword or phrase, and should be the weapon you use when dropping and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like plenty of work - and it is! But the number of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately create your business' rewards.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited,an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas ) publisher and search engine placement technology analyst.  You can contact Bob via e-mail at  seo711@gmail.com or visit his San Diego legal directory at:  http://www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com/special.htm