Choosing Keywords
A keyword is a word or phrase used to search for a site in search engines (for an extended
definition and explanation: Keyword )
Keywords are the heart of search engine optimization. Choosing keywords is one of the first things
you may need to deal with, because the keyword of the main page of your site should be identical to the keyword of the
domain name and both should reflect your business. If you name is Jimmy Jones and you sell widgets, the domain name of
your business should be something like jj_widgets.com and not Jimmy_Jones.com Few people looking for widgets are going
to search for Jimmy Jones. Of course, its different if your business name is IBM or Google. Lots of people search for
those keywords, but the firms spent a lot of money in advertising to make those words synonymous with computers and
search engines respectively.
Usually, you should choose keywords that are popular with visitors, less used in Web pages and that tell visitors and
search engines what is in your Web site. A special consideration for keyword choice is Web pages that are designed to
attract expensive Google advertisements.
Keyword popularity
The number of times a keyword is searched for on a given search engine is its popularity. Popularity is relative and
it is estimated. Google gives out statistics for trends in popularity of keywords and these can be accessed in various
ways.
At present Google offers:
http://www.google.com/trends which shows trends in
searches for a phrase or word and
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal which gives you the number of searches per month for a keyword and for suggested additional or alternative phrases.
Several tools provide information from databases with keyword popularity estimates from Google and other sources.One set of useful tools is provided by Technobloggie:
http://www.technobloggie.com/ particularly the tool at
http://www.technobloggie.com/keyword-tool/index.php
In other databases,the samples are based on much smaller user populations than Google or
Yahoo! may have. A popular one is Wordtracker:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
The number of other Web sites that use a keyword is a measure of how difficult it will be for your Web page to get to
first ten or first 100 pages retrieved in Google. If there are 800,000 pages ahead of you, will take longer to reach the
top ten than if there are only 10,000 pages. Google and other search engines display the number of
pages they store for a keyword when you search for it.
The trick is to find words or phrases that are relatively popular, but do
not retrieve many pages in search engines. That is your "niche." It is easy to be the top ranked site or page for
"Chocolate Covered Widgets," but nobody searches for that phrase, so the page will not get visitors. I got pages to the
top rank for "Palestion" "Sexonomy" and "isrealistic" in a few days because there is hardly any competition for these
keywords. There are other factors in competitiveness. If the competing top ranked pages are from authoritative Web sites
that Google and other search engines "trust" (high Google Pagerank) and that have hundreds of links, it is harder to get
to the top than if the top-ranked page is new and still has few links. For example, it is much harder to beat a CNN page
or a Wikipedia page than a page from "Joe's Favorite Web Links."
If you happen to find a new keyword that just became popular, you may be lucky enough to get top ranking with little
effort. If your Web site was dedicated to Osama Bin Laden and was indexed by search engines on September 10, 2001, you
had a big advantage over others. Likewise, if you found out about the artificially induced popularity of the nonsense
word googletestad you could get a top ranked page very easily when it was still important. I did that just for fun.
It takes much more effort to get to the top listings for very popular keywords like "Sex" or "News" that are used by
many Web sites. A small Web site may require years before it can compete for a keyword like France or England among the
top ten. It is usually better to concentrate on words that are relatively popular in searches and relatively unpopular
in Web pages. If more than 10 million pages are retrieved for a keyword, you will need a site with a relatively high
pagerank and very very good page design to get to the top, and a page with many links to it that use the right keyword
in the hyperlinks.
Keyword Design - "Keywords in key places" - Once you have chosen a key word for a Web page, that word should be
repeated in key places:
In the title of the page or Web site.
In the domain name of the Web site.
At the bottom of the page.
In the text - about 1-5% of the words in the text should be the keyword.
In links to the page.
In the file name of the page.
In some other places in the code that we will note below when we discuss coding.
