Search Engine Keyword Optimization

Finding Your Best Search Keywords

What are they looking for?

When you want to find something on the web, chances are good that you start by typing in a keyword or phrase into a search engine. When someone goes looking for products, services, or content like your site's, you want them to see your site at the top of the search results. The way to achieve this is by strategically positioning your site to maximize your search engine ranking on the most important keywords and phrases. But how to decide which keywords matter most to your site?

Tried and True Methods

There are several ways to find your strategic keywords, but there are a few obvious sources. First of all, think of what words you would use to search for your site's content. The next obvious place to look is in the "keywords" META tags and page titles of other web sites. Finally, look at newsgroups, mailing lists, and discussion groups on similar subjects to make sure you haven't missed any keywords. Simply browsing the subject lines of a few days worth of newsgroup postings will probably give you all the keywords you need.

Now, there's a Better Way...

So, you've got a list of keywords written down. Now it's time to find out which ones really matter to web surfers. We'll accomplish this by taking advantage of a "pay per click" search engine and a "pay for placement" site. For each keyword or phrase on your list, try it out to see how popular that search is.

After finding out how popular each keyword or phrase on your list really is, you can focus your search engine positioning efforts in the right place. Nearly every web site operator in your field of interest is trying to maximize their ranking on the most popular keywords. You may not be able to reach anywhere near the top of the list for your most prized keywords. Now that you know how popular each one is, though, you can work your way down the list until you start to hit pay dirt

Always try to rank well on the most popular terms, but don't forget that sometimes the best gold is a little farther down the mine shaft. We've gotten quite a few hits from the term "Web site promotion toolkit," but it may take us months to see a top 20 position for "Web site promotion." While we tweak our doorway pages for the most popular search terms in our field, we're still getting traffic from several search engines. And that's the way this game is played.