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Articles Index >> Marketing
Choosing the Right Key Phrases and Keywords
for Your Website
by Michael Cheney
The starting point to choosing the right keywords and key phrases for your
site is to think about how people use the web to find information. The vast
majority of people use search engines to find the information they're looking
for on the Internet. So if you conduct search engine optimization on your website,
you'll start to get search engine traffic.
One of the main ways that you do that is to choose the right phrases and keywords.
But it's almost like you need to be a psychic mind reader. You need to work
out what people are actually looking for. A lot of website owners will try to
second guess the customer and try to second guess what they think that customer
will type into a search engine, rather than looking at the actual reality and
fact of what people are typing in.
As a webmaster you are like a fisherman trying to attract the fish, but the
question is which bait will you use? Which keywords and phrases will you use
to attract those fish?
Just to give you some numbers, in the first quarter of 2005 Google had 5,737,097,000
searches. Yahoo had a lot of searches as well; 2,576,473,000 searches in the
first quarter of 2005. So you can see from these statistics that if you can
tap into the amount of people that are using these popular search engines, you
can instantly get a lot of traffic. That's why SEO, or search engine optimization,
has become such a massive industry. That industry is based on the concept that
you need to have the best keywords and key phrases on your website.
So the phrases you choose to associate with your website have a direct impact,
not only on how many visitors find you, but also on what type of visitors you
attract. Using the right phrases can literally mean the difference between success
and failure on the Internet.
If you think about it, if you're using the wrong bait, you're not going to
catch anything. So why is it that most website owners don't even think about
the key phrases or they leave it to chance? Don't leave your key phrase selection
to chance. You really need to pay a lot of attention to what people are typing
in.
You can get this information by asking customers. You could research your competitors
to see what phrases they're using. You could second guess using your own ideas
or ask colleagues, friends, family, etc.
These would all work to some extent, but the problem is that using phrases
produced in these ways is just guessing. What you need to know is what people
are actually typing into the search engines. The only way that you can find
that information out is by using a tool or a piece of software.
The one I use and highly recommend is called WordTracker.
You can get a free trial of it right now by clicking
here.
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