Keywords & Keyword Phrases

Keywords & Keyword Phrases

Keywords are the Key

Everything depends on keywords -- the individual words or phrases that people enter in search engines when they're searching for something. Almost every word or phrase will bring up hundreds, if not thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions, of web pages related to the search. And, unless one of your pages is very near the top of that list, how are people going to find you? How many of us go beyond the second or third (or even beyond the first!) page of search results?

Some people say, "Oh, I don't even submit my site to search engines! I don't pay any attention to them. I submit to directory sites, and I get plenty of traffic that way!" Of course, how do you (and everyone else) find the directory sites? By putting keywords or keyword phrases in a search engine!

The directory sites have been optimized for those keywords -- or you wouldn't be finding them. If you optimize your own site for your keywords, it may show up on the same page of search results as the directory sites that list it -- and then people have the option of going directly to your site, bypassing the directories and your competitors listed by them.

Merely getting yourself listed on the directory sites is a step toward good placement in the search engines. And some SEO (search engine optimization) gurus even claim to get better search engine placement by NOT submitting a site to them: letting the search engines find the site themselves, through links to it from other sites! Then, if you also get serious about your keywords, you can greatly increase the likelihood of your site being found by searchers.

The Crucial Question

THE ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL QUESTION TO ASK, of course, is: Which words and phrases are people actually searching for? There are a number of online tools that purport to answer that question. The best-known have long been Wordtracker and Overture, both of which deliver questionable results. Now, as of December 2004, Google has given us a keyword-suggestion tool of its own, Google Suggest, with a database immensely larger than Overture and Wordtracker.

Another option is to get your own software for analyzing keyword choices. One such program, which you can download free of charge, is Good Keywords. This doesn't directly monitor what people are searching for; instead, it shows how many web pages are registered by the Overture, Lycos, and Teoma search engines, for any keyword or keyword phrase you enter. It also generates a list of similar search terms, and tells how many pages appear for each of those; and it will search Altavista, DMOZ, Excite, Google, Looksmart and Yahoo, for your chosen word or phrase, if you like.

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Obviously, if you optimize your website for words and phrases that no one is searching for, it's unlikely that anyone will find you. Likewise, if people are searching for your keywords, but there are a zillion other sites using the same keywords, then -- unless you're the world champion of search engine optimization -- you're facing a similar prospect.

What to do? Remember the Middle Way! Let's look at an example:

Suppose you're making a page on how to optimize websites for search engines; and you don't know whether to use the phrase "search engine optimization" or "search engine placement" or "search engine ranking." Now, using Google Suggest, you can base your decision on the following data:

• for the keyword phrase "search engine optimization", Google shows 3,640,000 searches and 7,260,000 web pages;
• for the keyword phrase "search engine placement", Google shows 3,190,000 searches and 996,000 web pages;
• for the keyword phrase "search engine ranking", Google shows 10,100,000 searches and 2,360,000 web pages.

We see that "search engine optimization" has by far the lowest ratio of searches to web pages; and that "search engine placement" brings up the fewest web pages; and that "search engine ranking" has the highest ratio of searches to web pages, and also (by far) the greatest number of searches. So, optimizing your page for "search engine ranking" would probably be the wisest choice.

• ¤ Keywords in your domain name;
• ¤¤ Registering your domain;
• ¤¤¤ Keywords in subdomains:
• ¤¤¤¤ Keywords on your web pages: