The Key to Choosing Keywords

A place in the top ten or twenty would be nice, wouldn't it? Sound impossible? Well, it's not, and I'm going to tell you how to do it.

Most techniques to improve your search engine rankings have one thing in common--Keywords! The appropriate keywords are the key to ranking high in search engines.

But how do you go about choosing the most effective keywords? You must start by analyzing your business, company, product or service carefully, thinking of all the words that relate. Try getting a group of friends or family together to make lists of keywords or phrases they would use when searching for a product or service like yours.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself when compiling a list of appropriate keywords:

1. Who needs my service?

Have you carefully defined your target market? If so, this question should be easy. Now, let's say you offer weight loss supplements. The people who search for your product might use phrases like "low metabolism" or "fat blocker." They won't just search for the term "weight loss."

2. Should I include variations of my keywords?

Making your site easy to find means making your keywords as specific as possible. That includes using misspelled, capitalized, and plural words, as well as longer forms of keywords. For instance, you may need to use "metabolize" AND "metabolism" to cover all the possible search options.

3. Have I included any wrong keywords?

Do not include stop words like "and" and "the." You should also avoid overly common words like "Internet." Keep your words highly specific to your business. If you choose words that too many other sites also have, you will get pushed way down in the rankings.

Once you have your list of keywords, you need to place them properly on your site. The HTML title, text, meta description, meta keywords, ALT tags, comment tags, and URL name are all places were you~ll want to place your keywords.

It is particularly important to place keywords in your HTML title, because it is the first thing a search engine's spider sees on your page. The HTML title describes the content of your web page in one sentence, and is supported to some extent by every search engine.