Keywords - SEO - Better ranking in Google with the right keyword phrases - Search Engine Optimization

Keywords - SEO - Better ranking in Google with the right keyword phrases

How can you get to page one in Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other search engines, when there are many millions and billions of websites today? Isn’t it just totally impossible?

The solution is keywords and keyword phrases that can pull enough traffic to your website and which doesn’t have big competition.

Let me say this right away: If you do not make a proper keyword analysis and find the right keywords which pull traffic, the value of your search engine optimization will be zero.

Keywords research takes time to do and you must know your business, clients and your products benefits very well.

Keywords Research

When the users search for something in the search engine, he writes certain words which reflects what he is looking for. These words, or keywords, should match the words that you have used on your website. You must use these keywords on your website or you will no be found.

For example you could search for “house” on Google and you will get 2.160.000.000 search results. This is a huge amount and it makes it very tough to get at page 1.

But did you know that most people enters between 2 and 5 words when he search for something? This means if you do a search for “house tile roof” you are down to 2.630.000 results, and if you search for “house tile roof contractor boston” you get 225.000 results.

This illustrates that if you can construct a search phrase that exactly describes your products and services and use it on your website, you can narrow the traffic you will get through the search engines to only relevant visitors.

The art here is to find the right combination of keywords that will generate enough traffic for you and on the same time have limited competition. You target your optimization to these keywords.

Keywords recommendation

I recommend that you find 1 primary keyword phrase and at most 2 secondary keyword phrases per webpage and optimize the webpage to these keyword phrases. Don’t think that you can choose 10 different keywords and optimize your page to these. The traffic you will get, will be irrelevant. This will only hurt your ranking in the search engine. You will not be placed as high as you could using only one right keyword phrase.

Remember that you optimize each webpage, since Google treat each webpage seperately.

To find the right keyword phrases ask yourself what is unique about your business, what are the unique selling points about your products? Imagine what your customers would search for, take his viewpoint and see what he would search for, ask him and ask other people, friends, familiy what they would search for to find your products.

Now it is important that you use the right keyword tools. There are several to choose from, but I recommend: Wordtracker, Google Keyword Tool and KeywordDiscovery. In these tools you can see which keywords people search for over a certain period of time. Some of them also gives you a KEI, Keyword Effectiveness Indicator, whic is a measure for the quality of your selected keywords.

When you have chosen your keyword phrase, try to search for it in Google. Look at the websites on page one and two. These are your competitors on your selected keyword phrase. Analyze them with different tools and see how they have used their keywords. Observe where they have used the keywords and to what degree. You must do this better for you to beat them.

Now that you have found your keywords phrase you want to use, then what?

The first thing you should do is to name your webpage (the name of the file) using the most important keyword or keywords for that given page. Then you must use the keywords on your webpage. There are two sections on the webpage where you use them: In the header section and in the body section of your webpage. All webpages are divided in a header section and a body section. The header section contains all the information on the website that is for the browser, and the only information you will see from this section is the Title of the page. The information in the body section is the actual text and graphics you see in your browser.

Keywords in the header section

In the header section of your webpage you will find the most important part which is the Title of the webpage. It is extremely important that you select the right title for your webpage, and no you don’t just write the name of your website. This doesn’t work in terms of search engine optimization. When a user search for a search phrase in the search engine he is presented with the titles of the webpages found that are relevant to his search.

Many books on the subject on how to choose a title have been written, but the two I like to use are: “Tested Advertising Methods” by John Caples and “The Online Copywriter’s Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Write Electronic Copy That Sells” by Robert W. Bly. Remember to get your primary keywords in the title, preferably as early as possible. The title must no be too long, since Google only shows 66 characters of it. So the space is limited.

You have to write a compelling title for your webpage. This is your hook that the user bites on. It has to state a benefit and you could place your most attractive selling point in it.

In the search result is also a description of your website. The text you see here is normally the context of the keywords phrase of your website. It could also be the description part of the header of the webpage.

So you see, it is extremely important that you write something that will make the user click on your page.

On DMOZ you will find some recommendations of How you write a good description of your webpage.

The next part is to fill out the Keywords tag of the header section. You take the keywords that you have found for this specific webpage and put them here. And don’t repeat them. The search engines will consider this as spam. You can also put misspellings and keywords that are general for your site in the keywords part. The search engines don’t weigh the keywords tag that much anymore, but you should fill it in anyway.

Keywords in the body part of your webpage

You should divide the body part of your webpage into sections, each with a title. Every section can have subsections with subtitles. To tell the search engines about these sections, you use header tags. These are h1, h2, h3, h4 etc. Use your important keywords in these headers. This is important.

The text in each section and subsection must also contain your important keywords phrases. It is important to use the keywords phrases in the beginning of the first sentences of the webpage and spread them around in the text.

If you use pictures on your webpage the filename of the picture should contain an important keyword as well as the descriptive text associated with the picture (ALT tag)

If you link to other pages on yours or others websites, then make sure that you use keyword phrases in the anchor text (the text you see that you can click on)

You can also use bold, italic and underline to emphasize your keywords, but don’t use the all three in one page. This can make the page be difficult to read. The text must be readable to the user. If it isn’t he is just one click away from other websites.

The sooner the search engines see you relevant keywords on your webpage and the more it is spread naturally around your page the better.

Of course don’t just place them in every other sentence. It must be natural to read.

If you can find the right keywords phrases, that can pull enough traffic to your website and you use them right, you will get a good ranking in the search engines.

This is not the only way to get good placement in the search engines, but it is an important part of the puzzle.

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