How to Choose Your Search Engine Keywords
If you’ve set up your website and done a few ‘Google’ searches on Search Engine Rankings - you’ve probably learned that keywords are at the heart of Internet searches. They are the link between the searcher and their destination - the journey of any internet searcher starts with typing those few words into their favoured search engine. Everyone who has ever used the internet has started this journey so you are very well placed to appreciate the psychology of the process.
Let me make a simple but perhaps not obvious point in this article to help you choose the keywords to center your site around ( this is what you need to do to attract search engine traffic)
The pursuit of some common single keyword is often the goal of the new webmaster. To reach page one in Yahoo or Google for a common keyword is no easy task and it will definitely gain you traffic. Yet before you pour huge resources, time and effort into achieving this goal - step back and think about who would actually type these words into a search engine…
Some examples Double Glazing firm decides to target the keyword - ‘windows’. Firstly they are in for a shock if they hadn’t already realized they are now in direct competition with one of the World’s largest companies - Microsoft. Of course Microsoft probably don’t have an interest in installing double glazing in all the homes in Birmingham but that’s who you are competing against. The problem is the search engine has very little way of working out what the searcher wants if he types in just ‘windows’. Most will focus on the software but toss in a few high ranking non-software windows web sites just in case - try it and see what you get. This query is typed in approximately 9 million times a month - lets be honest how many of these are potential customers of our west midlands double glazing firm. Lets compare this with the phase ‘double glazed windows’ which is searched for by about 27,000 in the UK - which group would you want to view your website ? (please click the read more link below)
Sex - I’m sorry to be crude but it is occasionally the goal of your average web surfer. As a keyword to achieve number one ranking its pretty tough! From a commercial point of view lets reverse engineer this - is this surfer a potential customer of anyones service? Hmmm possibly but it’s not exactly focussed - I’m sure many services would appeal but he may not be ready to buy just yet (I used the masculine pronoun as I’m reasonably confident that the percentage of female searchers typing ’sex’ into Google will be fairly small - this may be naivety on my part though!). The searcher probably has more specific requirements which he will probably retype into the search engine - eek.
The point I am trying to make is that a single keyword is difficult to rank highly for - it will definitely bring you traffic. But will it bring you the right traffic? Every website has a goal, a target audience - these are the people you are trying to reach - the double glazing firm is going to realize zero benefit from attracting people wanting to buy the latest version of Vista. They would be much better advised to target ‘double glazing” with many less visitors or how about “double glazing birmingham” - is someone typing this in a good lead for a Birmingham double glazing firm?
It’s not rocket science - its really just common sense but in my experience often overlooked. Think…put your favorite search engine up and imagine what words your potential customers would type in to try and find you. These are the key words you should focus your website on - sometimes they are very valuable to you and of little use to others and thus ideal to target. A single word typed into a search engine is not a potential customer it is probably someone just mooching about the net killing some time - the only thing they will bring your website is to push your bandwidth charges up!
Any searcher who does type in a single word isn’t likely to trawl through thousands of pages looking for their answers - they are much more likely to retry their search by adding additional keywords.
FROM:-
Joe Simpson Search engine rankings
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