A Simple & Effective Keyword Strategy for Ecommerce Sites

By Karon Thackston

When it comes to ecommerce sites, there are plenty of keywords to choose from. Because sites typically follow a fairly set format, numerous pages are created between the home page and the order confirmation page. Those pages all need keywords and phrases if they are going to rank high in the search engines. So, how exactly do you choose the best keywords for each page? Here's an easy strategy to follow. (Please keep in mind that all keyphrases used in this article are for example only and have not been researched.)

Home Page - Broad Keywords

When you start out, use keywords and phrases that are descriptive of your overall site. For example, if you sold clothing for the entire family, you might opt for phrases such as "ladies clothing," "men's clothing" or "kids clothing." Those would be expressive, but could also be worked easily into the home page copy.

Think of the sales process as a funnel. It's broad at the lip and gets more narrow as you move closer to the spout. The same goes for the keyword strategy: broad keyphrases at first and more specific ones as the subject matter gets more specific.

Category Page - Specific Keywords

Once you move to the category pages, you'll want to select keyphrases that work well with what you're trying to describe in your copy. If your visitor clicks on the women's shoes category, she'll want to read about and see pictures of women's shoes. Perhaps you'll use phrases such as "fabric ballet flats" or "leather peep-toe pumps."

I typically create a paragraph at the top of the page, then add a descriptive sentence or two under each image. Sometimes, I'll also add a paragraph of copy at the bottom of the page. This helps guide your visitors through the sales process.

Product Descriptions - Long-Tail Keywords

The product description pages should incorporate long tail keywords that are laser specific. If your visitor clicked on a link for "Bermuda shorts" on the category page, you'll want to get as detailed as possible, so your customer can make the decision to buy.

For instance, a keyphrase such as "Liz Claiborne pastel plaid Bermuda shorts" would be perfect for a product description because it is. well. descriptive. Long? Yes, it is a long phrase. Most long-tail keywords will be. But the further into the sales process a customer gets, the more specific their searches will be. Chances are, someone who has decided she wants pastel plaid shorts will use a phrase like the one above instead of something like "Bermuda shorts."

Here's a plus: Because long-tail phrases are much less competitive than broader terms, you stand a better shot at getting ranked highly for them.

A Word on Linking

Here's where some copywriters get confused. When you use links in anchor text, you're giving credit to the page being linked to. For instance, if you have a category page for shorts, you would want to use the keyphrase "Bermuda shorts" in the anchor text of a link that pointed to the Bermuda shorts page. That way, the Bermuda shorts page gets credit for the link. The link would be of no (or very little) value to the general shorts page.

When you take note of the navigation and purchase cycle of your visitors, you begin to see why this simple strategy for keyword placement works so well. Using more specific terms as you write more specific copy helps usher visitors from the front door to the checkout counter with ease while also boosting your search engine rankings.

About the Author:

Get the latest release of Karon's popular ebook Writing With Keywords (formerly titled How to Increase Keyword Saturation). This new 4th edition includes 11 clever strategies for keyword optimization as well as the latest information about changes with how stop words and punctuation affect SEO copywriting. Order today at http://www.writingwithkeywords.com.

Exactly What Is Keyword Density?

By The Davinator

There are usually a lot of questions that arise when people hear about the term "keyword density." Many people are not sure of what the term is pertaining to, or are not sure of acceptable percentages of density. This little explanation of what the term keyword density refers to should clear up some of the confusion that arises.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn't be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places. At one time, before the search engine algorithms were set up to detect such spamming, people were tricking the search engines to get a higher placement by performing what was coined "keyword stuffing".

People were completely abusing the search engines, and over time, they smartened up and got wise to it.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your web page (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

- Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

- Go to the 'Edit' menu and click 'Select All'. Now go to the 'Tools' menu and select 'Word Count'. Write down the total number of words in the page.

- Now select the 'Find' function on the 'Edit' menu. Go to the 'Replace' tab and type in the keyword you want to find. 'Replace' that word with the same word, so you don't change the text.

- When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

- Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

The above way of checking your keyword density is a bit of an old fashioned way, but it still does work for the purposes of figuring out what you density actually is. These days, there are many different types of softwares on the market which makes this
job a whole lot easier.

About The Author:

Davin Ogden owns and operates several web sites on the internet. He mainly specializes in SEO and viral marketing. For more information on keyword density, SEO, and many other aspects of SEO please visit his site at http://www.davinatorbiz.com

Having The Proper Keyword Research Tools

By The Davinator

There are many different types of keyword research tools out on the market these days. Some are free, and of course, some are not.

When we are talking about keyword research tools or software, you really need to take this part of your marketing seriously. For if it wasn't for good keyword research, most people wouldn't have much success at all. This is the reason that it is so vitally important to have good tools to work with.

There are some online services that have been around a while. Some of these sites and tools are still regarded for their high quality, and rightly so. Word Tracker, is among one of the first and still remains to be one of the most effective sites around. It's been proven time and again, it is simply a great tool, that provides quality results.

SEO Book has been largely popular in the past couple of years as well. I've often used SEO Book's Keyword Research tool in many cases, and did cross references between a couple of the other alternatives around. It does provide great results as well. While I don't think it may be quite as accurate as Word Tracker, it is still a good tool to be utilizing in much of your research.

Overture's keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but it will not tell you how many sites are competing for a certain keyword phrase. For example if you type 'golf clubs', the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the words 'golf clubs' was searched, say for example 340000 times at Overture.Com. Similarly 'golf balls' was searched 310987 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common highly searched term then you might not get any results. It means that hardly anybody has searched for that term in the last month.

There is a bit of a newer keyword research tool out there these days that can be obtained for free as well. The Groovytastic Keyword Dominator is such a tool, and it actually takes all of it's results from Word Tracker itself. So this is really good in terms of having a great source for it's information that it brings back. It returns all of the keyword results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Some people regard these three search engines as The Big Three, meaning that these are the search engines to be really concerned about.

There is a drawback of The Groovytastic Keyword Dominator though, and that is, the keyword research software only returns results for the top 100 related results. It won't dig down any further than one hundred deep in finding related keywords or keyword phrases. This really only means, that in some cases you may not find that real low hanging fruit, or combinations of long tail search terms.

The Groovytastic Keyword Dominator is still a very good and useful tool though. It performs good and accurate keyword research fast, and does give you the results that in many case will be enough that all important start on building and creating your site around your chosen set of keywords and keyword related phrases.

About The Author:

Davin Ogden owns and operates several websites on the internet. He specializes in viral marketing strategies and SEO. Check out his site containing information on keyword research, SEO software and more at http://www.davinatorbiz.com.

Keywords Are King For A Home Based Business

By Kelly Walker

There are many diverse sales tactics that people use in the promotion of their online business, but there is virtually always one thing that ties all of these tactics together. Every single successful home based business is successful primarily because somewhere in that method there are keywords that make the approach work. When it comes down to it keywords determine almost everything possible on the internet and that is exactly why when it comes to the land of online internet marketing and home based business keywords are king.

The Significance of Keywords

Why are keywords significant to a home based business? Well it all has to do with internet search engines. Try to think about how many times you have been interested in a particular topic, and as a result you have gone online and used a particular search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN? If you are like the majority of people that have used the internet, the answer is quite frequently. Although there are some people might exclusively search the online encyclopaedias and other similar products, the vast majority of internet users will use search engines to look over the millions and millions of online sites. When you take into account the amount of internet users all over the world this amounts to hundreds of millions of people conducting billions of searches each day. The phrases that people submit to search engines when looking for items that relate to your online business should be the same as the keywords that you use on your website. If your keyword placement has been done correctly it will ensure that your website is directly linked to search engine results. It is for this exact reason that when it comes to home based business success, keywords are king.

Plan of Attack

It is always a good idea to have an implementation plan for your keywords before you begin to set up your home business website. The best way to put together the plan is to first think of all the keywords that are directly related to the website that you are building.

For example, an all inclusive website on affiliate marketing would greatly benefit from keywords like "work from home" and "make money online". Once you have compiled your list the next
thing you need to do is run those keywords through keyword tools to ascertain the volume of searches per month conducted on each keyword set and rank them accordingly. Then, brainstorm a list of synonyms for your keywords and search for those. It is preferable to have at least 100 keywords that relate to your website before you formulate your plan of attack. By carefully following this process you will most likely find that you will end up with a lot more.

Search Engine Optimization

An important segment of your attack plan has to revolve around placing your chosen keywords into places on your website where they will attract the attention of the search engines. The procedure for doing this is known as search engine optimization. In essence Search engine optimization means getting important keywords that relate to your home based business into the titles and sub-titles of the website pages that you have as well as making sure that keywords are sprinkled throughout the text in appropriate percentages. This process, although easy to learn the basics of, is very difficult to master. If you are putting together your own website, it is a very good idea to learn the basics of search engine optimization.

About The Author:

Kelly Walker is a successful internet marketer and the owner of http://reklaws.com. Kelly writes on a variety of topics on buisness and marketing. To learn more about this topic and other ways to make money online Kelly recommends you subscribe to her free newsletter at: http://www.reklaws.com.

Write For Robots Write For People

Article by Andy Crestodina

Without good web copy, the best team of designers andprogrammers in the world can't help you. The goal is good writing and a clear, concise message that speaks to the target audience.

But let's assume that you already have that: Maybe you're re-purposing some amazing copy that you've used for another medium—a print piece, perhaps. How can you adapt it to work well online?

If you want people to find you, you have to speak to search engines. But if you want them to stay, you have to speak to people. Writing for search and writing for visitors are often competing endeavors.

Write for people

Think of how you look at a newspaper: skim headlines, take inthe first few sentences of interesting articles, and if anopening captures you, read on to get to the meat of the piece.

Feature journalists and copywriters often strive to evoke emotion and pique your curiosity early on. Once they've captured your attention, they develop the central themes of the story.

Web writers, on the other hand, structure content in a sort of inverted triangle: meat first, details later. Why the stark contrast?

Well, think of how you look at web sites: Click, glance, click, scan, read a little, click, next page, click, click. Your eyes quickly gather an idea of what the page is about, your brain decides if you're interested, and then you read a bit or move on. The entire process takes only a few seconds.

To support this quick-to-click behavior, web copy should be easy to scan and understand at a glance. It should include plenty of:

* Bulleted lists (like this one)
* Captions
* Headings and sub-headings
* Bolding
* Short paragraphs
* Links

Write for robots

If you're concerned with your rank in search engines, this next part's for you. Targeted web content is one of the keys to successful search-engine optimization (SEO) . There are 3 basic steps for creating web copy that will boost your search position:

1. Research the optimal phrases for your business
2. Select your keywords through careful analysis
3. Show your relevance with optimized copy

Let's look at an example: Say you're creating a site for your Chicago-based knitting store. To show search engines that you're relevant, you'll have to boost your keyword frequency — which means that you might have to bend the rules of writing for people.

Ideally, your key phrase will appear 5 – 7 times in the body text of the page (links and headers don't count here—although your keyword should definitely appear there as well). So you start with this:

"Learning to knit is easy. Just sign up for our convenient classes."

But, since "knitting classes" is the target phrase, you change it to this:

"Knitting is easy to learn when you sign up for our convenient knitting classes."

In the first case, "knitting classes" never appeared as acomplete phrase. In fact, the word "knitting" didn't show up at all. As a bonus, "knitting" appears twice in the revised sentence.

True, the first example sounds better. But if you're competing for search-engine ranking, you're better off with the second version.

Ready for a real challenge? Work the word "Chicago" into the page 5 – 7 times—and keep it next to "knitting classes" if you can. This is where it gets tricky. After all, you might lose visitors if your copy is too clunky and repetitive, like this:

"It's easy to learn knitting in Chicago if you sign up for Chicago knitting classes."

Or even worse: "A new class of Chicago knitting classes is now available in Chicago for those interested in a knitting class."

This is called keyword stuffing, and I don't recommend it. It goes too far. Instead, spread out your phrases so the text makes sense for humans. This is easier to achieve if you have a few hundred words on the page. (After all, search engines love text-heavy sites.)

It's all about striking a balance. Don't sacrifice your message for your rank. Instead, focus on getting people to your page and keeping them there with targeted, concise content.


About The Author:

As a principal and strategic director at Orbit Media Studios, Andy draws on his knowledge of marketing, usability, and interactive design to lead strategic planning for the firm and its clients. Orbit specializes in web, print, and video design & development http://www.orbitmedia.com .

Using Differentiators in Keyphrases: What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Needs to Know

As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors – a process that only takes seconds.

One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the website itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your website – in other words, making certain that the visitors who arrive on your site are likely to take a point of action that eventually leads to a sale. Split tests, modifications in content, different color schemes, and numerous other variable elements can all have a measurable impact.

There is also another way that a quality search engine optimization company will seek to maximize the value of the prospects that find your website through search engines. In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Differentiators

As more and more companies turn to organic search to gain a competitive advantage while promoting their products and services, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve high rankings for the generic terms that everyone in your industry is pursuing. While any ranking is ultimately attainable, eventually a search engine optimization company has to decide whether the effort involved is worth it, especially when it recognizes that you can get overall better results from the campaign by making sure that a very high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you offer.

This is why your search engine optimization company should be able to leverage differentiators in your keyphrases to give you the best competitive advantage available.

What Keyphrases Will Work Best for Your Business?

Suppose that you are in an industry where companies can have a wide array of prices, approaches, customer service levels, and so on. Instead of targeting, from the outset, the general keyphrase that defines the industry (for example "email marketing"), a good search engine optimization company will take the time to help you gain a competitive advantage by realizing what is different about your company in order to a.) attract very highly targeted prospects who know what they are seeking and b.) reduce the competitiveness of the keyphrases they are choosing.

Let's take a look at a high-end provider of email marketing that has advanced web-based functionality and focuses on the B2B market. This fictional business is seeking a competitive advantage by working with a search engine optimization company. We can safely assume that the percentage of people that type "email marketing" into a search engine who are looking for this exact type of company is anywhere from between 0 and 100%.

By looking into the popularity of other variations, however, we can see that it is nowhere near 100%. Phrases like "cheap email marketing" or "free email marketing" are very popular, demonstrating that many people seeking "email marketing" are not looking for exactly the service that the provider is offering.

Imagine that instead of targeting "email marketing", a daunting task (that, even if achieved, assures that a high percentage of visitors that come to the site are not looking for the provider's particular type of solution), the search engine optimization company takes advantage of the provider's differentiators. In this case, the search engine optimization company would instead target phrases such as "business to business email marketing" and "web-based email marketing". Suddenly the two objectives have been achieved - the provider knows that a much higher percentage of visitors that are typing these terms are actually looking for the right kind of company and the competitiveness of the phrases has also been reduced, leading to faster and higher rankings.

Using Modifiers to Give You the Edge

There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company's differentiators, including words such as "free", "affordable", "high-end", "full service", "proven", "turnkey", etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your website. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall website performance.

Conclusion

Remember, your company is better than the others out there. Ask yourself why, and then tell your search engine optimization company to take advantage of these differences in your keyphrases to give you a competitive advantage in your industry. The subtle addition of a few seemingly minor modifiers can have a huge impact on your bottom line.


About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008), Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

Using Differentiators in Keyphrases: What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Needs to Know

By Scott Buresh

As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors – a process that only takes seconds.

One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the website itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your website – in other words, making certain that the visitors who arrive on your site are likely to take a point of action that eventually leads to a sale. Split tests, modifications in content, different color schemes, and numerous other variable elements can all have a measurable impact.

There is also another way that a quality search engine optimization company will seek to maximize the value of the prospects that find your website through search engines. In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Differentiators

As more and more companies turn to organic search to gain a competitive advantage while promoting their products and services, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve high rankings for the generic terms that everyone in your industry is pursuing. While any ranking is ultimately attainable, eventually a search engine optimization company has to decide whether the effort involved is worth it, especially when it recognizes that you can get overall better results from the campaign by making sure that a very high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you offer.

This is why your search engine optimization company should be able to leverage differentiators in your keyphrases to give you the best competitive advantage available.

What Keyphrases Will Work Best for Your Business?

Suppose that you are in an industry where companies can have a wide array of prices, approaches, customer service levels, and so on. Instead of targeting, from the outset, the general keyphrase that defines the industry (for example "email marketing"), a good search engine optimization company will take the time to help you gain a competitive advantage by realizing what is different about your company in order to a.) attract very highly targeted prospects who know what they are seeking and b.) reduce the competitiveness of the keyphrases they are choosing.

Let's take a look at a high-end provider of email marketing that has advanced web-based functionality and focuses on the B2B market. This fictional business is seeking a competitive advantage by working with a search engine optimization company. We can safely assume that the percentage of people that type "email marketing" into a search engine who are looking for this exact type of company is anywhere from between 0 and 100%.

By looking into the popularity of other variations, however, we can see that it is nowhere near 100%. Phrases like "cheap email marketing" or "free email marketing" are very popular, demonstrating that many people seeking "email marketing" are not looking for exactly the service that the provider is offering.

Imagine that instead of targeting "email marketing", a daunting task (that, even if achieved, assures that a high percentage of visitors that come to the site are not looking for the provider's particular type of solution), the search engine optimization company takes advantage of the provider's differentiators. In this case, the search engine optimization company would instead target phrases such as "business to business email marketing" and "web-based email marketing". Suddenly the two objectives have been achieved - the provider knows that a much higher percentage of visitors that are typing these terms are actually looking for the right kind of company and the competitiveness of the phrases has also been reduced, leading to faster and higher rankings.

Using Modifiers to Give You the Edge

There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company's differentiators, including words such as "free", "affordable", "high-end", "full service", "proven", "turnkey", etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your website. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall website performance.

Conclusion

Remember, your company is better than the others out there. Ask yourself why, and then tell your search engine optimization company to take advantage of these differences in your keyphrases to give you a competitive advantage in your industry. The subtle addition of a few seemingly minor modifiers can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

© Medium Blue 2008


About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008), Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

How To Choose Right Keywords To Market Your Website

By Daniel Smith

Anyone who knows anything about how search engines work will tell you that you need to choose the perfect keywords in order to improve your search engine ranking. Yet, if you are relatively new to the website creation scene, you may have very little knowledge about what keywords are, what they do and how they enhance search engine optimization (SEO). Nevertheless, understanding what keywords are and how they work is critical to your websites success and the amount of traffic you will receive at your website. Let's take a look at what keywords are and how to choose the right keywords to improve your SEO techniques. In doing so, you will immediately be able to put such knowledge to use and improve your page ranking in search engines.

Keywords are used by search engines to determine whether or not your web pages will address the needs of Internet users that are conducting a search. The more keywords that are found on your web pages, the more likely your webpage will be listed as a response to a user's query. Yet, a webmaster must bear in mind that not enough keywords on a webpage will have little to no affect on a web page's search engine ranking, while a web page with too many keywords may also have little affect. Why? Quite frankly, an obvious attempt to sway a search engines listing actually reduces the quality factor of a web page and a search engine will rate it lower than it would a web page that contains quality information.

Therefore, choosing keywords is part of the website marketing process: having the right keywords appear on a webpage will result in increased traffic to your site. There are a number of web resources that will help you determine what keywords are frequently used, like keyword generators and the like, but the problem with such tools is they don't necessarily identify the right keywords that will ultimately draw traffic to your site. Instead, you need to be choosy about what keywords you use. First, you can go with the most popular keywords suggested, but the most popular keywords don't always necessarily work in drawing traffic to your site, nor do they always help you improve your SEO and page ranking within major search engines.

First, you will want to try and use truly specific keywords when generating keyword enriched web pages. Try not to be too vast in your descriptions-if a keyword generates 20,000 pages in a search engine, chances are your keyword enriched page isn't going to make a huge difference in you web traffic. Yet, if you are using keywords that few than a hundred sites use you may find that your search engine ranking is increased because so few sites use the specific keywords you have chosen. Obviously then, it serves to tell you that one keyword enriched webpage may not make a huge difference in your overall web traffic, but several keyword enriched pages will. Just be sure to use uniquely defined, themed keywords within your web pages and watch your ranking improve in the major search engines.

Another unique way of selecting keywords can be found in viewing similar websites to your own. Find out what other webmasters are using to draw traffic to their website. How do you do this? First, review many websites that are similar to yours. Watch for repeated themes within websites-do you see a pattern? Take that pattern and use it to your advantage, using a keyword generator determines which keywords are most unique that fit the pattern that other websites are using. Next, generate a few web pages that are keyword enriched with your selected keywords. Conversely, if you are familiar with html, you can view a webmasters source codes and see what Meta Tags they are utilizing. Meta Tags reveal the keywords of a page and can give you a good clue as to how the competition is approaching the keyword enrichment process, if at all.

Whatever you do, when in the process of searching for keywords, don't just throw your best guess out there and go with it. Although it is possible that you may get lucky and actually improve your website traffic and search engine ranking, it is unlikely. Most keywords that are the product of a webmaster's guess are far too broad to make any kind of difference in search engine ranking or web traffic.

There are a lot of little tricks one can use to make the best of the keyword enrichment process. You can write articles that focus solely on the keywords you have selected or you can hire freelance writers to do the work for you. You can make use of a variety of free and subscription web tools to improve the type of keywords you choose. Either way, once you have found the right keywords you will immediately note an increase in your web traffic-an increase that undoubtedly accompanies your improved search engine ranking-an improvement that is the direct result of your improve SEO techniques.

About The Author:

Daniel Smith writes about directory text links http://www.linksattack.com

Search Engine Optimization for the Rest of Us

By Nowshade Kabir

When you have launched your website, whether it is an eCommerce store or a corporate promotional site, you must have set certain goals regarding the quantity of traffic you are expecting to have on your site. If you did not pursue your goal with specific web promotional marketing strategies, chances are there you are not very happy with the results you have achieved so far. Although, there are numerous web promotional methods available to your
disposal, optimization of your webpages for search engines is the uncontested leader in this field. If you sell products or services through your website, it is even more so for you. Consider this. Out of various possibilities which include: going to a shop, calling a shop, etc. the prospective buyer decided to search for the product online. Then he or she used certain key-phrase to make a query on a search engine and then among other sites, he or she chose yours to click in. As a seller this is the kind of visitors you need for your site! Search engines have more than twice the e-commerce conversion rate of other traffic acquisition sources. You can get these results for your site with the help of search engine optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is a set of actions carried out with a webpage to improve visibility of that webpage in search engines. The goal is to ensure top places in the search engine results for a specific query.

How important are the search engines? Data show 81 percent of Internet users find the sites they're looking for through search engines. Over 57% of Internet users search the Internet everyday. Up to 500 Million searches take place in a day. 55% of all Internet purchases originate at a search engine as oppose to 9 percent from banners. These statistics are pretty convincing, but surprisingly, according to StatMarket.com only 7 percent of websites are visible by search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can really bring amazing results. Our page http://trade-leads.rusbiz.com recently started to show on the first page of Google for the search phrase "trade leads". Within the last month we have noticed almost 30 percent increase of traffic to this page which is pretty much inline with the available statistics. If your optimization efforts started to bear fruits and you ended up on the second or third page of Google search, you can expect a dramatic increase of almost 5 times more traffic than before and after two months it can be over 9 times! An upward move from 2nd and 3rd pages to the much coveted first page will bring an increase of around 30 percent. Along with the traffic the conversion rate - the quantity of actual purchases - also goes up significantly.

Your position within the first page also makes a lot of difference. The top positioned web page in the sponsored - paid advertisement - receives 50 percent of all clicks and first three top ranked web pages garner 60 percent of all clicks.

Once you have decided to go for search engine optimization, your next step is to figure out for which search engine you should work on optimizing your site. After all there are so many search engines out there!

If you look at the latest statistics available for the month of November, 2005 compiled by Nielsen/NetRatings it, probably, won't be any surprise to you that Google at present has the most search market share. There were 5.1 billion searches done in November. Out of 60 search engines monitored, Google had a share of 46.3 percent,Yahoo - 23.4 percent, MSN - 11.4 percent, AOL - 6.9 percent, Ask Jeeves with its other affiliations MyWay, Teoma, Iwon and search sites of Excite Network has a combined share of around 6 percent, etc. This clearly shows that Google is the undisputed leader among search engines at this moment. That's why in your quest of getting more traffic to your site, you have to emphasize on Google. Other key indicators which favor Google as well are:

. Google is most favored by business people - 82.9 percent of all business users make their queries through Google.

. The Google users are more educated. They are more likely to have a college degree.

. The Google users are from higher income groups.

As mentioned earlier search engine optimization is a set of actions that you have to take regarding your web pages. Here are the key steps of the process:

Select keywords for search engine ranking
1. Make a list of keywords that you think buyers might use to search for products and services you sell.
2. Use a Thesaurus to check synonyms of the words and phrases that you have chosen. You may come up with additional keywords.
3. Eliminate all single words from the list!
4. Go to several of your competitors' websites and check out what keywords they are focusing on by viewing the HTML source of the pages.
5. Now go to Yahoo! pay per click search marketing site Overture, which has an excellent keyword selection tool. Google also has a similar tool located at
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox.
6. Get the search phrases or terms that are popular enough and fall into your criteria from above mentioned lists.
7. Check where you stand with these keywords or key phrases in main search engines. Find the needed tool for this here. http://www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm.
8. Now try to find whether you should use your keyword in singular or plural, or which one of the two similar search terms or phrases are more desirable by going to the following page:
http://www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp. Remember, studies show that conversion rate for plural words are in general higher than singular!
9. Now that you have a number of keywords, cluster two to three of them for one single page. Remember, every page of your site should be built surrounding one single theme and focused on
maximum two to three keywords.

Optimize the pages for keywords

Place keywords in Title tag, Meta description, Alt tags, Heading tags, Comment tags. Here is an example:

<title>Search Engine Optimization for the Rest of Us</title>
<meta name="description" content="Article about search engine ranking at ezine.rusbiz.com">
<meta name="keywords" content="search engine ranking, optimizing web pages for keywords, SEO steps">
<meta name="author" content="Nowshade Kabir">
<meta name="copyright" content="Nowshade Kabir">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

Create content

Now develop informative content using these keywords. Use your key words in headlines and alt tag of the pictures. Make sure that you don't over do it! If you stuff keywords more than
necessary for a normal text, search engines can ban your site for keyword spamming. Here is a tool for checking density of keywords on a page: http://www.gorank.com/seotools/. Maximum
preferable density is 3-5 percent.

Submit to search tools

Effective promotion of a website starts with submission of the site to various search tools available on the Internet. There are two different types of search tools - search engines and
directories. Search engines index their listings based on the information retrieved by their spiders which crawl through the hyper links constantly looking for new websites. The directory
listings are compiled by human editors from the URLs submitted to the directory. If your website is listed in the directories you can be sure that the spiders of different search engines
sooner or later will index your site. That's why you should start submitting your website to the directories. The major directories are GMOZ, Yahoo!, LookSmart, etc.

Link popularity

The quantity of links in different websites pointing to your sites is called link popularity of your website. The more popular is your site the more links you get from other websites and vice
versa. Link popularity is one of the key factors that search engines consider in their search algorithm while indexing a website. What would be the rank of a website in a search result
depends on its link popularity in a very big way. Work on getting as many backward links as possible, preferably from the web pages with higher page ranking than yours.

Track ranking

Search engine optimization requires constant monitoring and updating. Don't forget that the competitors are working relentlessly on achieving high positions. The search algorithms are also constantly changing and improving. That's why every now and then you should check out how your site is doing.

Track traffic

If your work started to bring good results and you are getting more traffic, but the visitors are not taking expected actions, this means, you probably have selected wrong keywords. Start all
over again with keywords analysis.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing web pages for natural or organic - as they are also called - searches. Once you are certain that you have done everything possible to
achieve maximum results in this sphere, you should consider pay per click marketing with Google, Yahoo and MSN. Effective web promotion requires a combination of both of these two search engine marketing strategies.

About the author:

Nowshade Kabir is the CEO of Rusbiz.com, a global B2B Portal, which helps companies build web store, buy and sell products and services using eMarketplace, eCatalog and other features. Rusbiz also offers website development packages: http://www.rusbiz.com/design_package.html

How Keywords Affect Your Rankings

By James Mahony

This article explains a few things about SEO, and if you're interested, then this is worth reading, because you can never tell what you don't know.

We all want to know how keywords affect our rankings, but to find out we'll need to do a little work. Many say keywords are the key to good search engine rankings, although they aren't at
all the only factor.

If you need a tool to help you decide on your keywords, try Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool - it allows you to test your keyword rankings by showing you statistics on recent searches for them. It's a great tool when you have no clue which keyword you should choose, as it can give you a list of terms that were recently searched on.

Keyword Density.

Keyword density refers to the number of the keywords contained within your text relative to the amount of text there is. Preferred keyword density ratios vary between search engines, but you should generally try to keep them between two and eight percent (major search engines prefer the lower end). Keyword analysis tools can help to optimize a web page's keyword density. These tools are good if you're not sure of what you're doing, as they're very intuitive and explain things as you go.

Counting the Keywords.

Many SEO experts will tell you that the keyword density of your text isn't a very important factor, and that you should be careful not to overdo it. So is there a limit? How many times should you use your keywords? SEO experts won't be able to answer these questions for you, because no-one's really sure of the answer. The best answer is that it changes regularly, and you can never be sure - you have to experiment to see what works for you.

Location of Keywords.

When testing the effects of keyword location, we found that pages with the keywords at the top and bottom of the page ranked higher on Google than pages with the keywords in the middle.

I trust that what you've read so far has been informative. The following section should go a long way toward clearing up any uncertainty that may remain.

Many other search engines also give keywords more or less weight based on their location, but keep in mind that each search engine's algorithm is different. Here's a list of how most search engines prioritize keyword positions, from most to least:

1. Domain name.

2. Page title.

3. Headings (i.e. H1, H2, etc.).

4. Body text (the first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more).

5. Meta tags (especially description).

6. Links (including keywords in the URL or link text of links to you).

7. Alt text (the 'alt' descriptions for your pictures).

Really, though, keyword density is one of those areas where you'll have trouble on your hands if you try to second guess the search engines. Be cautious.

As your knowledge about SEO continues to grow, you will begin to see how SEO fits into the overall scheme of things. Knowing how something relates to the rest of the world is important
too.

About The Author:

James Mahony is the founder of http://www.searchmama.com - A site dedicated to Search Engine Optimization http://www.searchmama.com
http://www.thedomaintycoons.com
http://www.articlesforwebsitecontent.com

15 Tips To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

By David Riewe

There are many factors that make blogs much better than normal WebPages including the speed at which blogs are indexed, ability to submit to blog directories & normal directories, pings and track backs. All these little things can help drive more traffic to blogs. Here are 15 popular techniques you can use:

1.) Create at least four keyword posts per day. Most of the top blogs such as Boing Boing, Daily Kos, and Instapundit (with literally tens of thousands of visitors per day) publish an average of 30 small 100-150 word posts per day according to "Secrets of the A-list Bloggers: Lots of Short Posts" by http://TNL.net

2.) Submit to My Yahoo! When you submit your own RSS to My Yahoo it is indexed by Yahoo.

3.) Submit to Google's Reader. When you submit your own blog RSS to Google's Reader the Google Blog Search will index your site.

4.) Add a relevant link directory to your blog and trade links like a demon possessed! Although it may take more time than simply submitting to a search engine one time, this method is perhaps the best way to drive traffic to your site. Use software such as Zeus to speed up the link trading process.

5.) Use ping sites like ping-o-matic. Ping your site every time you add a new post.

6.) Submit your blog to traditional search engines such as AltaVista, and MSN.

7.) Submit your blog to traditional directories such as DMOZ. Directories (particularly DMOZ) increase relevance with Google. DMOZ is very picky, but what do you have to lose by trying?

8.) Submit to as many RSS Directories and Search Engines as possible. This is a simple but repetitive process that can be done with software such as RSS SUBMIT.

9.) Comment on other blogs. Do not just leave short, lazy comments like "I agree." Leave well thought out replies that will force readers to wonder "who wrote this?"

10.) Use track backs. If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site.

11.) Go offline. Use newspaper ads, public bulletin boards, business cards, even stickers to let as many people as possible know your blog exists.

12.) Ad a link to your blog in your e-mail signature block.

13.) Use Groups (Usenet). Find a relevant group on Google groups, Yahoo groups, MSN groups or any of the thousands of other FREE group services and find like minded people and talk with them. Make sure your use your blog URL like it is your name.

14.) Use Forums. Forums are one of the best places to go for advice. Go to forums and find problems to solve. Make sure you leave your blog name, but be tactful about it; some forums get annoyed with those who selfishly drop a few links to their own site and leave.

15.) Tag your website. Tagging is a new idea that has erupted across the web. Sites like http://Del.icio.us, Technorati and many others have a social feature that allows you to place your article under keywords or "tags" that everyone interested in that tag can see.

Although these are some of the most popular ways to drive traffic to your blog, do not limit your self to tips and lists. Use your imagination and you will come up with thousands of ways to drive traffic to your blog!

About The Author:

David Riewe - Internet Marketer and Publisher
http://www.free-online-course.com

6 Steps To Picking Profitable Adsense Keywords

By Greg Lietz

Knowing how to find the best keywords for use in your Adsense ads is not a straightforward process. Finding and implementing high profit, low competition keywords in your ads really is the trick for making Adsense payoff big.

After I had tried several things to pick out good performing keywords, I wrote down this process that should yield profitable, low competition keywords for your Adsense ads. This process is not perfect, but when you analyze it and try it for yourself, you can see that it makes sense. Adsense that is.

Step 1
Research some keywords for your niche that have a high CPC value. To do this, first find your keywords using the Google Adwords keyword tool or another tool that will give you niche specific lists of keywords. Save those keywords into a spreadsheet program as a csv file. Copy and paste those keywords into Google's Traffic Estimator (you will need an Adwords account). The traffic estimator will give you the estimated clicks per day and the average cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. Copy and paste this information back into your spreadsheet file for later reference.

Step 2
Multiply the average CPC by 30% to get an estimate of your maximum earnings per click. The higher the average CPC, the more likely the CPC for the 2nd - 8th positions are high as well. You want this higher average CPC to start because if the CPC starts to drop off significantly after the 3rd position, your chance of getting high click earnings as an Adsense publisher will be diminished.

Step 3
I use a tool called Adword Accelerator to help with estimating the 1st - 8th position CPC values. This tool will estimate the CPCs for each position and allow you to see how much the CPCs drop off after the first position. This dramatically helps your analysis for picking the most profitable keywords. If the CPC values stay close to the each other and to the value of the first position, then you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

Step 4
Now determine which Adsense ads occupy which positions. You can do this by searching on Google for your keyword and looking to see which Adsense ads are generated in the search results and in which order they are. Another way to estimate this is to use the Adword Accelerator tool. It has a feature whereby Adwords ads are dynamically displayed for a given keyword you input into the tool to check. If the Adwords advertiser has used "Adwords for Content" in his advertising, these ads will be the Adsense ads someone else is displaying on their website.

Step 5
Compare the ads you found in step 4 to the results of using the keyword check function at the website http://www.adsensecheck.com. If the advertisers you find by doing this closely match those you found in step 4, you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

If the advertisers are not he same, then the advertiser is possibly not using the "Adwords for Content" mode of advertising in his campaigns. This means that the keyword may not be the basis for the Adsense ads and may not be profitable.

Step 6
Now you must get the traffic. If you decide to get traffic using the Adwords approach, then just use the keywords in your Adsense ads that scored well from the above evaluation. Then, use lower cost per click keywords in your Adwords ads. The difference between the earnings from the click you get on your Adsense word from the cost of the click you pay on your Adwords word will be your profit.

If you are planning to use search engine optimization techniques to get traffic to the website where your ads are, make sure the keywords you choose have the highest KEI possible. KEI is the ratio of the number of searches for a keyword to the number of competing sites having the keyword. The combination of a high KEI and a high score from the above evaluation will yield the best profit results.

About The Author:

Greg Lietz is a freelance writer and internet businessman. His main website is
http://www.theonlinebizplace.com where he provides content about internet based business opportunities, web site marketing strategies, writing articles and starting your own online home business.

Using Keyword Research To Improve Web Traffic

By Ben Anton

The use of appropriate key words is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Selecting and targeting pertinent key words and phrases is crucial for building web traffic and getting the audience you want for your web pages. Like any other type of advertisement, your key words must be carefully chosen to ensure that you achieve both high page rankings and relevant traffic. Achieving high page ranks is useless if the traffic it brings you is not the right audience. For this reason, many experts believe that the target key word list used for a site can mean either success or failure for a web site or online business.

It is no longer enough to simply choose a relevant domain name for an online business or web site. Choosing the right key words for the site is now equally if not more important. The majority of people who visit a site get there by using a search engine. They will type in two or three words that describe what they're looking for, scan the resulting list generated and pick one that seems relevant until they get the answer or product they need. This is where target key words are utilized. Key words are what enable people to find your site; choosing the right key words for your site will ensure the right people find you.

With this in mind, identifying your target audience is the first step in creating relevant key words and phrases. Again, this is not dissimilar to targeting television advertisements. Consider location when you are developing your target market. For example, if you own a used car dealership in Hayward, California, any traffic you get from outside a very specific area is virtually useless to you. Similarly, if you operate an online business that does not ship outside the USA, generating traffic from other countries will not help you make sales. By adding key words that are specific to your location as well as your product, you will better hone into your target audience, improve your rankings, and achieve a better conversion rate, which will help increase your site's page ranking, in turn.

Keyword competition should also be taken into consideration when developing a site's key word list. Going back to the used car dealership example, let's say a potential customer types in the word "cars" into a search engine. They'll never find what they need, because it's far too general-generating around 500,000,000 different sites to choose from. Typing in "used cars" generates almost 70,000,000. That's still too many to deal with effectively. Using "used cars Hayward" generates almost 900,000 hits, and narrowing the focus even further by using the zip code rather than the city name reduces it to less than 25,000.

Choosing key words for your web site works the same way. If your key words are too general, your target audience will never find your site, because the search terms generate so many web sites that it is impossible to look through them all. However, if you go too far in the opposite direction and use too many key words, or key words which are too specific, you risk losing business as well. The best key word phrases are no more than three words in length.

So how do you choose the right key words? The first step is brainstorming with colleagues, friends or an SEO professional, to come up with a list of 20 or more appropriate key words. The Google Keyword Tool is an excellent place to research key words. By entering key words into this tool it will give you an idea of the popularity of certain words and offers you alternative key words and phrases.

Once you have a good list of terms, you may want to refine it to call out the strongest terms that have the best potential for sales or traffic conversion. There are several good online research tools available, which can help you decide which words will be most effective for you. Some good examples are WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. These sites may charge a fee for using their database. After reviewing the terms, eliminate the key words that rank poorly or are very unpopular, then prioritize the remaining terms according to search popularity. These terms will become the keywords you will want to focus your initial SEO campaign on.

Always remember that when it comes to key words, you are focusing on optimizing your traffic rather than maximizing it. Setting up the right keyword list for optimization is the cornerstone to a successful web site.

~Ben Anton, 2007

About The Author:

Ben invites you to read more about key word research and PPC campaigns at Mad Fish Info's web site - http://www.madfish.info.

How Can You Use Original Content To Market Your Website?

By Chris McElroy AKA NameCritic

Whether you sell a product or a service, whether your business is conducted exclusively online or only partially over the internet, marketing is essential. After all, just because you can reach millions of people online doesn't mean that you will.

After all, how many businesses similar to yours exist online? Without marketing, how will you set your company apart?

The simple answer is that you won't. Therefore, it's important to understand the ways in which marketing a business online is different from marketing a brick and mortar store in the center of town.

In order to market your business online, you need to understand the importance of original content. Original content - in the form of website pages, blogs and articles that you use to market your site - will be what sets you apart.

When your website is created, it's important to use unique, keyword rich, relevant language. In some cases, your web designer may provide this service, however, if content creation is not a part of their package it may benefit you to hire a content writer to create the text of your website.

Keyword rich, relevant text will help search engine spiders to rank your site. However, it's important in terms of search engine marketing to regularly update your site - to keep it relevant. A blog is an effective tool for keeping the content on your website fresh.

Think about this for a moment: a blog - short for weblog - is unique, keyword rich and relevant content that is updated daily. If offering great content on your site initially improves your search engine ranking, wouldn't it benefit you to have content that updates daily?

That content, however, should not exist solely for the search engine spiders; it should also provide information with your current customers as well as to prospective customers. A blog does just that: it opens a dialog, enabling your business to reach out to your customers and clients and to provide them with the information that they're looking for.

Electronic newsletters work in a similar way: with them, you can reach out to those who are interested in learning more about the products or services that your business offers. You can use a newsletter to provide information about upcoming product releases, to offer tips and tools that will save readers time or money, or even to offer discounts and incentives to your subscribers.

Of course, just as you can create keyword rich, relevant articles that reach out to your newsletter subscribers, you can use article marketing to draw in a wider customer base. By
creating articles that focus on keywords and phrases associated with your product or services and publishing those articles in directories online, you will be able to establish your knowledge, experience and expertise in the marketplace.

Those prospective customers who are seeking products and services similar to yours will find you credible and follow links back to your website. They will feel confident that you understand what they are looking for and that your product or service will benefit them.

The important thing to focus on, however, is that your content must be relevant to what current and prospective customers are looking for. Your content must contain the information that these individuals are looking for - and, in order for them to find it, it must be written in a way that draws on your keywords and key phrases.

For many, this seems daunting. Creating fresh, keyword rich, relevant content is not something that everyone is good at - especially when it means creating that content on a regular basis, weekly or daily.

About The Author:

Content providers such as http://www.ArticleContentProvider.com to create this content for you. Creating website content, writing a daily blog, ghostwriting articles, creating ebooks, Article Content Provider makes it easy for business and individuals to use original content to promote their websites.

Right Words Key To Being Found Online

By Raymond Lee

Regardless of how great your website looks or how good of a product or service you have to offer, if you can't be found online, you're your wasting time and money. It's like building a fancy billboard along the highway and no one driving down the road - no one sees it.

Today's search engines are hard to fool and if a website attempts to manipulate the results, there's a good chance of being removed from that search index. There are some things you can do to make your site more attractive to search engines, and the main one is making the site more attractive to users.

Forget Search Engine Spiders, Focus On Users

When a web user is searching for a product or service, they will use a search engine, entering a search term related to what they are looking for. If the title page of your web site or the information contained on your site does not include that term, your site will be ignored during that search.

A couple things search engines examine when they index pages is the information on your site and how many other sites link back to you. A link is like a vote for your site and the more votes you have, the higher the opinion the search engine will have of your site. However, if that search term isn't on your site, you will still be ignored.

Focus On Your Site's Visitors

Having quality text-based information can do wonders for your site recognition from search engines. Typically called keywords, articles containing the ones associated with the information on you site will be more recognizable to search engines and have more of a chance of being listed for a particular search term. While there is no magic number of times a keyword should appear on your page, having it appear too many times, a practice known as keyword stuffing, may hinder your efforts of being recognized.

The main idea is to offer quality information on your site, pertaining to the main subject of your site, geared toward user who find your site through a search. If the user can find informative text when they visit your home page, they will be happy. A search engine spider may also find your site and move your name up in the listings. However, gearing your site towards the search engine does not promise anything more than getting you listed. It's the quality of the information on your site that will bring visitors back and increase your sales.

About The Author:

Raymond Lee is a freelance writer with over 20 years of business experience as well as the winner of numerous writing awards. He is the owner of WritePro Writing Services at http://www.writepro.biz

Keyword Optimization For Building Internet Traffic

By Professor Jeff

Keyword optimization is one of the most surefire ways of building some reliable traffic for your site. Keyword optimization is a way of enriching the content of your pages to meet the requests that people put in for on search engines. If the request they put in match the keyword son your site, your site will be in the list of websites that appear that match the search the customer put in.

The thing about keyword optimization is arranging your pages and finding the keywords that will draw the attention of the search engines. You have to either use software that is found on the internet or the power of your brain to think about what it is you are trying to do with your keywords. If you were looking for information on the particular niche that your website has to do with, what kinds of searches would you put in on the search engine you usually use?

Think about the way you would phrase your words; those are your keywords. The more times you use your keywords and other related key phrases that people may put in in a search engine blank, the more hits you will get off of those search engines, increasing your traffic. Using variations of the original key phrase and key words, and secondary keywords and key phrases are important when it comes to proper keyword optimization. This gives your potential site browser more chances to get in touch with your site based on the keywords they decide to use.

Keyword optimization must also be an accurate representation for the content on your web pages and what you have to offer through your site. The higher your site ranks in the search engine rankings, the more hits you will generate through your page which can only mean more traffic, and ultimately more dollars, for you.

About The Author:

Professor Jeff has been inspiring and teaching students for years. He began his career in the public schools and since has served on the faculty of many prestigious institutions including the University of Michigan. His passion for helping others has helped him to establish a strong presence on the internet and a firm foundation in marketing. To learn more about Professor Jeff's winning MyWorldPlus team,visit: http://www.MyWorldPlusPro.com
http://www.MyWorldPlusPro.com/info

Try Using Long Tail Keywords For Your Website Marketing Campaign

By Tom Niehoff

Like many website marketers, I use long tail keywords in many popular pay per click programs to drive targeted traffic to my websites. For those new to long tail keywords, a `long tail' is simply a keyword phrase that is very specific, and longer than your average keyword.

Let's say you have a website about credit repair. Here are a couple example keywords for that:

Credit repair
Credit repair online
Credit repair program
How do I repair my bad credit
How do I repair my bad credit score
Help with repairing my credit score

The first three keyword sets would probably be considered normal keywords, and the last three would be considered long tail keywords. Long tail keywords have several advantages, and some disadvantages:

Advantages:

- Highly targeted traffic. If the user searched for that particular phrase, they are ready to buy, and know what they want.

-A LOT cheaper bid prices. Not much competition on that keyword from other PPC users.

Disadvantages:

- Less traffic coming from those keywords.

- You have to come up with quite a few of these long tails to get much traffic on them.

Considering that you have a chance to drive highly targeted traffic to your website, while save a lot of money on your pay per click program, I would highly suggest getting started on long tail keywords.

The best tool I have found to start your long tail keyword list is Google Adword's Keyword Tool. Simply log into your Google Adsense account and click on Tools. This tool takes a given keyword, and gives you results that often contain many valuable long tail keywords. The results can show you how much search volume there is for that given keyword, and what the average cost per click will run.

Of course, you can also export this list, and use the same keywords in other pay per click campaigns.

About The Author:

Tom Niehoff has been marketing websites full time since February 2006. You can learn how to market your website too, visit http://www.GuaranteedWebsiteIncome.com

Optimize Your News Releases

By Harry Hoover

Today's news release is written differently than those from the past. It needs to be newsworthy and it needs to sound like a human wrote it. However, you must include the right keywords in it. Let's examine some news release optimization techniques. Research Is Key. If you have already optimized your website, then you know what keywords to include in your releases. However, if you are starting from scratch, it is important to do some keyword research. There are some decent free keyword research tools, like the stripped down version of Wordtracker, the one from SEO Company and Google AdWords. Look for keywords that have the highest volume and the least competition. For instance, when we launched AccessURP, we searched for keywords that would bring people looking for commercial real estate in Charlotte, NC to the site. We used several variations of that phrase in our pay-per-click ads, in our search engine optimization, and in our news releases.

Anchor's Away. Use anchor text in your releases. You'll notice in the news release how I anchored the phrase commercial real estate. This provides an important backlink using keywords. PRWeb has a wealth of tools to help improve your release for the online environment. Additionally, PRWeb distributes directly to consumers and journalists interested in your topic. They also distribute releases to bloggers, and thousands of websites syndicate their content.

So, for as little as $120 per release, you can build high quality backlinks to your site and cost effectively reach people interested in your release.

About The Author:

Harry Hoover is a partner in Charlotte, NC ad agency http://www.mycreativeteam.com/creative.php My Creative Team. He has 30 years of experience in crafting and delivering bottom line messages that ensure success for serious businesses like Bank of Commerce, The Bray Law Firm, CruisingTheICW.com, Duke Energy, Jacobsen, Levolor, National Gypsum, North Carolina Tourism, Rubbermaid, TeamHeidi, VELUX, and Verbatim.

Don't Compete For The Most Popular Keywords

By Roy Carter

A common mistake that website owners make when trying to drive traffic to their sites, is to try to compete for the most popular keywords within their niche.

Let the novices fight over these keywords. They will have virtually zero chance of getting on to page 1 of the major search engines because every man and his dog is trying to use the most popular and competitive search terms.

Just because the Overture/Yahoo keyword selection tool, or Wordtracker says there are no searches for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, that does NOT mean that nobody is using that keyword phrase to look for your product or service.

The above mentioned tools are a first port of call for hundreds of thousands of website owners. However, that means that the keywords that are thrown up are used by thousands of people as well, making them extremely competitive.

Those tools are also skewed in favour of USA results, simply because there are more people in the USA using the tools than anywhere else.

Let me give you an example...

One of the websites that I own is to do with moving to Cyprus to live.

If you type 'Moving to Cyprus' into the Overture/Yahoo keyword selection tool it reports that virtually nobody is using that keyword phrase.

That's because very few people in the USA are looking to move to Cyprus to live.

However, more than a million people a year from the UK and Europe are thinking about moving to another country to live and Cyprus rates in the top 10 destinations that they are considering (Australia is first and Spain second, USA third etc).

The lesson to be learned here is that I get a lot of traffic to my various sites from keyword phrases that are given a zero or low score by these commonly used tools.

So, if you think of a keyword phrase that you think YOU would use for a particular search, don't decide against using it, just because these tools return a supposedly low result.

While others are fighting over the most popular search terms, you can be working smart and driving traffic to your sites using keywords that are being totally ignored by others.

Remember...Work smart not hard!

regards,
Roy Carter

About The Author:

No.1 on Google out of 59,400,000 results. Want To Drive Massive Traffic To YOUR Website The Easy Way? Work Smart Not Hard!
http://www.TrafficMadeEasy.com

Getting The Most Out Of Your Pay-per-click And Keyword Campaign

By ShirleyA Kelly

Before you start your next Pay-Per-Click or keyword campaign, you had better get a good understanding of what to do and what not to do or you will spend far more money than you intended and your ROI (rate on investment) will not be good. Having a good understanding of how pay-per-click advertising works can help drive targeted traffic to your website and increase your bottom line.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is quickly becoming the fastest and most effective way to reach the top search engine rankings for given key words and phrases. The concept is simple - we pay
or bid competitively, for the placement within each search phrase.

While many of the search engines still have free inclusion, this does not always guarantee top placement. Keyword saturation and search engine optimization or the purposeful use of the keywords often within the website content, is also an unpredictable and often unsuccessful method of gaining ranking.

PPC ads are similar to typical ads within Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP's), but they are above free listings often labeled "Sponsored Sites." While some offer image or banner advertising in the same auction manner, most PPC ad services focus on text ads with a website URL and brief description of what the site offers.

Where each ad is placed depends on the keywords and key phrases you select for your ad campaign. Depending on the PPC search engine, this fee may be as low as $.01 going up based on popularity, demand and exactly how much others are willing to pay for high placement.

While advertisers pay only by the actual clicks made, visibility is, in essence, free. However there is an unspoken fee associated with "unpopular" or rarely clicked ads. Most Pay-Per-Click services balance the ad click-through rate (CTR) or how many times a viewer clicks the ad and the bid amount we're willing to pay for each click when determining the ultimate seniority of each ad. Because CTR does play a significant role in placement, its wise to bid higher at the outset to gain significant clicks. It is also wise to gain as much interest and click through with each ad as possible to establish a stronger and lower priced ranking. Once this seniority is established, the cost may be lowered without harming the position quite as much.

PPC advertising offers instant results, good or bad. Once an ad is placed, it may be online immediately (in the case of Google AdWords) or within a week (in the case of Overture), receiving clicks and being rated immediately. Because of this instant response, unpopular keywords can be disenabled if not attended to fast enough making it next to impossible to use the keyword or phrase again. Also, because Pay-Per-Click advertising is an auction-style marketplace, SERP placement changes constantly.

To meet these needs, many major PPC advertising engines allow budget and automatic bid set-up. This allows you to put a maximum per day or per campaign budget on clicks, after which
the ad is taken down until the budget is either replenished or automatically rolled-over to the next period. For instance, an advertiser may place a budget of $100 dollars per day on a campaign. When clicks meets this ceiling, ads stop until the next day to use up the next $100.

When conducting a Pay-Per-Click ad campaign, remember to keep the customer and their motivation in mind, develop a list of keywords that describe the products and services, target
keywords the customer will be searching for and use specific phrases that clearly define the offering. Veer away from broad keyword matches, items we don't offer or information that isn't
available on the website.

The current PPC marketing has more advertising demand than available, top-ranking spots. It's not yet known how this demand will measure out or how PPC services will address this concern in the future.

Possibly the most important part of developing PPC ad campaigns is finding the right keyword phrases. To begin developing a strong keyword phrase list, type the initial ideas of what people would search for when seeking the website in a new Excel spreadsheet. Look through the site and analyze the words that describe the products or service. Review the website, identifying words that would be of most interest to the viewers. Check web server logs to find the words visitors currently use to find the site and what pages they find most interesting. Consider what action the customer should take - find information, purchase something, bookmark the site for later shopping or other positive advertising result.

Use the Google Keyword Tool, Overture Keyword Tool or http://WordTracker.com to find other relevant searches around the initial ideas. Its best practice to use the longest search phrases possible, using those no less than three words long. The more specific, the lower the cost and the more targeted traffic received. If selling specific brands, use the brand names in the keyword phrases.

Customers search during all phases of the shopping cycle - from gathering data to comparing prices and finally submitting their credit card with the store. Use keywords within each phase,
considering the highest conversion will come from the audience ready to buy.

Each keyword phrase should be product or service specific. Select the type of keyword searches the ad will show under, such as broad matches, exact matches, negative matches and so forth. For example, a bookshop may want to advertise under the key word phrase "car books," but not show up for the search term "Kelly blue book cars." They have the option of blocking searches with the term "Kelly blue book cars" in the phrase.

Keyword selection is important to narrow down the exact target audience and search relevance. Additionally, the ads gain a stronger click-through rate or CTR when carefully targeted to the search traffic. Ads with low CTR may be disenabled. Ads with high CTR will gain higher ranking at a lower bid cost.

When we target exactly what the consumer is looking for, conversion rate increases significantly.

When searching online, potential customers may type many variations of the keywords including misspellings, plural form or switched word orders. So use these in the Pay-Per-Click ads also to gain the strongest and broadest audience range.

When we target exactly what the consumer is looking for, conversion rate increases significantly.

When searching online, potential customers may type many variations of the keywords including misspellings, plural form or switched word orders. So use these in the PPC ads also to gain the strongest and broadest audience range.

Needless to say there are far more aspects to Pay-Per-Click and Keyword Selection than I can cover in this article but the information provided here should give you a good insight into understanding how important it is to have a good understanding of how the whole Pay-Per-Click and keyword selection works.

About The Author:

Shirley Kelly is a full-time internet marketer who has written over 200 articles in print and published 5 ebooks. To read her latest book, "The Newbies Guide To Internet Marketing" visit her at http://www.websitemarketing2.com

Drive Traffic To Your Website Using The Right Keywords

By ShirleyA Kelly

Search engines are the #1 tool people use when shopping for products, services or information online. Optimize your website with the proper keywords or keyword phrases for your content and watch your traffic explode. If you gain an understanding of how to properly promote your website your efforts will reach it's full potential.

To rank relevantly within search engine results, each website must be considered relevant to a particular search algorithm for a given keyword or phrase. Keyword selection can be a challenge to both experts and neophytes. While anyone can come up with various words that may be used when searching for their product or service, these words may not be the ideal mix for search engine ranking. Why? If a marketer chooses a popular keyword phrases, he or she and a million other businesses compete for top placement. Top SERP placement is dense, searchers typically giving up after the first three pages. To succeed, one must use relevant keywords that are not being used by everyone else and that are searched for quite often. This may include misspellings and other alternative data. After finding relevant keywords and phrases, the results must encourage conversion or success based on each business' criteria. For example, while it may be possible for a DVD rental firm to get top listings under the search criteria "free DVD rentals", the person who visits is looking for free merchandise and will leave if its not found.

For optimal search engine rankings, a page will be optimized for only one to two popular but non-competitive keywords or keyword phrases.

Keyword Coding

HTML coding are two words most people never want to hear, especially in a learning environment. But it's important to understand the basic web page header structure and where the search engines look to find key words for search engine ranking pages (SERP).

Sites rank highest when each page is optimized separately. For instance, a business may have one website with unlimited interlinking pages. The top page must be named "index.HTML."
While each sub-page may be named according to the designer or programmer's preference. Ideally sub-pages are named according to the strongest keywords or phrases for each business. Both the domain name and the URL or complete web address string, are important factors in determining search engine relevancy

Three important META tags are on each individual HTML page located between the "head" tags: description, keywords and title. The webpage description is the short sentence that displays after the listing name is the SERP's. The keywords are not viewed by the casual surfer, but offer a clear-cut description of what is found on the website or who's behind it. The title is the most condensed of all metatags. The title should repeat the top 1-2 keywords and describe what the site is about.

We can take the keyword theme as far as necessary, yet success through search engine optimization is not a 100% guaranteed way to gain top rankings and can often dilute the site and
information quality by becoming a string of repetitive keywords, not value-added information. Some of these tactics include adding pages of keyword-rich articles solely to rank high. Another is developing a mini-empire of interrelated sites not for expert information, but solely to make the sites appear more important and relevant to the main site focus.

To ensure a small 30-page website is optimized, it must first renew keyword use each month to find the most popular terms for the three major search engines, Yahoo!, Google and MSN. Each
page must be optimized for different but interdependent terms to strengthen the site as a whole. This involves new keyword research and website content for each page every month.

An example of a good ecommerce site using paid advertising instead of keyword optimization is buy http://automotive.com. Notice the content is relevant to the visitor entering and seeking the product. In contract, auto http://anything.com, a competitor site, relies heavily on keyword content, uses text that has no purpose and confuses the visitor with too many navigation links and useless words meant for search engines alone. Though this may gain rankings with work and keyword saturation, it can also damage a business reputation and ultimately lead to less sales.

Needless to say there are far more aspects to choosing the right keywords than I can cover in this article but the information provided here should give you a good insight into understanding how important it is to design a website that is keyword friendly.

Let's face it, there is no magic bullet when it comes to successfully promoting your online business. There are pros and cons to almost everything you do. If you never develop a plan and put that plan into motion, you'll never know if that's the plan that will ultimately be the "magic bullet" that launches your online business to new found success.

Do give up! If at first you don't succeed, TRY, TRY, AGAIN! There is a lot to learn when starting a online business. Give yourself a break and don't set unrealistic goals. Contrary to
popular beliefs, having a successful, profit making, online business doesn't happen overnight.

So, Good Luck, Make Money and Have Fun Doing It - Shirley Kelly

About The Author:

Shirley Kelly is a full-time internet marketer who has written over 200 articles in print and published 5 ebooks. To read her latest book, "The Newbies Guide To Internet Marketing" visit her at http://www.websitemarketing2.com

How Important Are Keywords To Your Website

By David Fishman

When you hear everyone talking about tags they are referring on how you will summarize what your site or page is about. What else is your site (or blog) about? Deciding on the correct keywords is not an easy task but to make the work easier you should use a keyword program that will give you the proper statistics to make an educated choice when choosing the keywords for your site.

Customers who search the web key in using a certain keyword, if you did not use the keyword the customer is using they will not end up at your site. Make sure you use proper tools to let you
know which keywords are the most important.

Many webmaster drive traffic using search engine optimization, what you need to do is optimize your website with the correct links, keywords and content and this will rank high in the free
part of the search engine.

These are the words or phrases that can best describe your content. Think about which words or phrases describe best your product or service and note the words used on your competitors'
websites. What if you knew exactly what words they typed when using a search engine? Keywords aren't just some words that allow search engines, like Google, to find your web site.
Keyword can be single word, two or three words, multiple words and theme based.

Finding a good SEO consultant is sometimes hard to do, if you do find a good SEO person they sometimes show you techniques that will assist you in getting your site to number one. One
important part when designing your site is to find an SEO consultant that is able to work with you designer, by both working together you will get a site that is well designed and seo ready. All of your other SEO strategies won't help you at all if you choose the wrong keywords.

A great tool to help find keywords that are associated with your sites theme would be overture's search term suggestion tool, you are able to retrieve statistics that we determine which keywords you should use to market your website and build your sites ranking. This is a great tool to use when you have no idea what keywords to choose from, the tools give your statistics that were just searched on.

Yahoo is perhaps the only search engine that still uses the meta keywords tag but places very little weight on it. Meta Tags are most commonly used to distinguish the keywords that are relevant to a page's content.

When writing articles make sure the article is in the same theme as your website, this way when you are looking for keywords you will be able to use the keywords that match your sites theme. When placing a link on the article, make sure the anchor link is one of you keywords, don't use the domain name of your site, and use the anchor link with one of you keywords. Distribute as many articles as you can with the keywords for your website, this will build on the keywords you want the search engines to use.

If you are posting to directories or doing some type of reciprocal link exchange make sure the title has your keywords in it. Try not to make a title that has none of you keywords.

About The Author:

http://www.linknetics.com is software that helps reciprocal link exchanges. Spread your links everywhere by article submitting.

Choose the Right Keywords

Chris Angus

Choose The Right Keywords

Choosing keywords is one of the most important tasks when it

comes to SEO; it falls only behind link building on a scale of

importance.

You need to think very carefully about what keyword phrases and

word choices people would use when looking to buy your product

or service.

Knowing what keywords people are using for searches is

fundamental to your sites success.

Firstly, you need to construct a big list of words that relates

in anyway to your product or service, these keywords or phrases

need to cover every aspect of your business or products that

are related to your business.

I would also suggest choosing keywords that are also related to

your keyword phrases.

Therefore, one step away from being directly related to your

business, this will help catch a bit more traffic.

Put yourself in your customers shoes - What search phrases

would you type in if you were looking for your service.

Think about your business as an outside that knows nothing

about your business or industry.

The next step is to judge how valuable and competitive the

search terms are. The higher the numbers the harder is going to

be to rank for a particular search phrase.

You can do this with a variety of tools free and paid for. They

include: Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery Google Adwords and the

Overture tool. I would suggest using the overture tool and

choosing phrases that have between 3000 - 10000 searches per

month, any more searches and it's going to take a long time to

rank and any less and you won't get enough traffic.

Now narrow down your list to about 70 keyword phrases and

scatter them across your websites content. Choose three or four

of the most competitive keyword phrases and have them on your

home page copy. Repeat your "Top Three" keyword phrases at

least ten times on your home page.

About The Author:

Chris Angus is a freelance writer and

journalist. He is available for hire and website promotion.

http://www.seocompanyuk.com/

http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com/

http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk/

Will Longer Keyphrases Hinder the Effectiveness of Your Copy?

Article by: Karon Thackston

The length of search phrases continues to grow. Back when the

Internet was just an upstart, single keywords were the only
thing you needed. But in recent years we've seen the number of
words used in search phrases triple and quadruple. Rather than
a single keyword, searchers who live in countries where English
is the primary language are now using three- and four-word
phrases as a standard, according to Web analytics company,
OneStat.com.

While the worldwide average is two words per search phrase, the
USA, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia all show that
searchers prefer the use of three- or four-word terms. What does
this mean from a copywriting standpoint? Writing with a single
keyword in mind is relatively easy. Using two-word terms is a
bit more of a challenge. But when you get to three- and
four-word phrases, your risk of sounding stiff and awkward
increases substantially.

Why Longer Phrases?

Longer search phrases are the natural progression of the
Internet population boom. As more and more information is
placed online, it becomes increasingly difficult to find exactly
what you're looking for. When there were only a few thousand
sites, entering the word "marketing" into a search engine would
bring up a handful of sites for you to choose from.

Now, however, you find hundreds of thousands of sites dealing
with everything from marketing plans to marketing jobs to
university curriculums for marketing degrees. The natural action
for copywriters is to follow the search trend of the target
audience and use the keyphrases that they use.

That leads us back to our original question. how?

Tips for Writing With Keyphrases

The biggest mistake I find search engine optimization (SEO)
copywriters making is attempting to substitute a generic term
for a specific keyphrase. For example:

At our Mexico cruise vacation site we offer the best rates on
Mexico cruise vacation packages to the most exciting Mexico
cruise vacation destinations. Visit our Mexico cruise vacation
specials page for deep discounts today!

Or

Welcome to our Chicago web design firm site. If you're looking
for innovative and creative Chicago web design firm, you've come
to the right place. No other Chicago web design firm has the
talent or technological skills to develop the type of high-end
sites we do. When you're ready for a truly professional Chicago
web design firm, contact us today.

Oh please! My 10-year-old nephew could write better copy than
that. When you substitute generic terms (in this case: site,
packages, vacation destinations, vacation specials, etc.) with
the specific search phrase, you get a bunch of repetitive,
awkward babble. The longer the keyphrases are, the more clunky
the copy will sound.

The best advice I can give is to break up some of the mentions
of longer keyphrases. Yes, you do need to keep the words of the
phrase in the same order most of the time. However by using
punctuation and other elements you can still make the phrase
appear less obtrusive.

For example, let's look at our Mexico cruise vacation site
again. Rather than using that bunch of fluff written above, try
this instead:

Long stretches of sunny beaches, delightful fiestas filled with
lively bands and some of the most delicious fresh seafood you've
ever tasted. Where can you find it? In Mexico! Cruise vacation
destinations from Cancun to Cozumel offer some of the most
exciting adventures and beautiful scenery found in Mexico.
Cruise vacation specials make these remarkable getaways even
more affordable than you might think - etc., etc.

Do you see what was done? Using punctuation, the phrase "Mexico
cruise vacation" was broken up between sentences. Because the
search engines all but ignore punctuation, they see the phrase
as one term. However, the site visitor doesn't. They don't
notice that the phrase is being repeated because it spans two
sentences.

If the trend continues as it has in the past, search phrases
will get even longer in the not-so-distant future. However,
when you get creative with keyphrase use in your copy, you'll
find longer search terms are not a problem to work with.

About the author: Be sure to also check out
Karon's report "How To Increase Keyword Saturation (Without
Destroying the Flow of Your Copy)" at
http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword.

Copywriting With Google's Dynamic Keyword Insertion Tool

By: Karon Thackston

Automation is an odd creature. It usually seems, at first glance, that automating a process can make things easier, simpler and faster. But oftentimes, once an automated process is in place, trouble spots pop up. This is sometimes the case when looking at the copywriting aspect of Google's dynamic keyword insertion tool.

In case you're unfamiliar with dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), it's a feature of Google's AdWords program. It is often used for large campaigns in order to automatically insert the keyword into the headline of an ad. Truly, it's a lifesaver for many pay-per-click (PPC) ad managers who have to stay on top of thousands of ads every day. It's all done with a simple syntax command: {keyword:_______}.

From a timesaving standpoint, this is a wonder tool that has rescued PPC managers from the mind-numbing chore of typing the same keywords over and over. From an economic point-of view, DKI *can* (not always) perform well enough to make it a viable option for larger campaigns. But what happens with regard to copywriting and eye tracking?

See It and Click It

The human eye is normally drawn to things that are unusual. Things that look out of place or different get noticed far more than things that blend in. For instance, on a page full of black text and black & white photographs, a small red square in the bottom corner will get focused on almost immediately. Why? Because it is completely different than everything else around it.

This same principle applies when considering your copywriting strategy for AdWords. When using DKI, you'll want to keep your eye on the results pages. Why? We've all heard that using the keyphrase in the headline pulls better. It does. most of the time. There is an exception, however. This exception is what you'll be watching.

In fact, a study done last year by Enquiro, Did-It and Eyetools tracked users' interactions with the Google search results page. It found that surfers normally reviewed the page in an F formation. They would scan vertically down the left side of the page and then over to the right(where paid ads are) *IF* something caught their attention. That's the point we'll explore in this article.

In order to get clicks, you first have to get seen. If your ad looks and reads like all the rest, you've completely lost your originality advantage.

See For Yourself

Copywriting using DKI is a balancing act. You have to consider several factors, including the character count of your longest keyphrase, your ability to add text to the keyword-rich headline and how the ad looks on the page. Take a look at some examples below. Remember that AdWords results show differently at various points throughout the day (and in relation to individual account parameters), so you may not see exactly what I saw when doing this research. I'm sure it will be close enough for you to get the idea.

Go to Google and type in the phrase "cruise vacation center" (without using the quote marks). See how all the ads look different? They don't all have the same words bolded. They don't all use the same copy. The bold words stand out because they are different. In this case, your eye will usually go first to the ads with bolded words in the headline.

You see ads offering a 6-night cruise for $xx.xx and other ads promoting X% off on a cruise vacation, etc. There is diversity and that's a good thing.

Now, what if you type in "home improvement"? (Again, without the quotes.) If your results page looks like mine, practically every ad has the exact same headline: home improvement. Not only do most of the ads look the same, the headlines read the same. Your eye doesn't know where to go because everything seems identical. But wait! About four or five ads down, something catches your eye. It's an ad that has no bold in the headline. That stands out because it's different! As you scroll further down the page, more ads with no bold in the headlines pop out at you. In this case, because everyone else has opted for the DKI feature, their headlines are all very similar, making them less noticeable. But the ones who wrote custom headlines won out, thanks to diversity.

Tips for Writing With DKI

If you want or need to write using the DKI option, consider these tips:

1. Use a descriptive word along with your keyphrase. Instead of just inserting the phrase "airline tickets," place the word "discount" or "cheap" before your keyphrase to help it stand out.

2. For keyphrases that will take the entire 25-character limit, consider using one word of the keyphrase in the headline, instead of the entire phrase. Rather than "home improvement," try inserting just "home" or "improvement" along with other text you write yourself.

3. Keep it applicable. Your headline still has to convey a strong message about what the customer can expect at your site.

4. Test & Track! Everything in advertising is subject to change. Smart marketers always test and track to get the best results.

With a little forethought, you can develop a combination of DKI and custom-written AdWords ads that drive qualified visitors to your site.

About the Author:

Copy not getting results? Learn to write SEO and online copywriting that impresses the engines and your visitors at http://www.copywritingcourse.com. Be sure to also check out
Karon's report "How To Increase Keyword Saturation (Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy)" at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword.

Keyword Density

By: Scott Lindsay

Keywords. always keywords! It's amazing how much of a headache they can be. You spend hours and hours researching, planning, making lists, and calculating keyword density, for what? To be successful online, to reach those high SERPs all webmasters and online entrepreneurs dream about: to be number one.

You are ready to pay the price; you are ready to choose a company that promises you top ten results guaranteed. Guess what? There are no warranties; there is no keyword secret formula. You want to be number one? That's hard to achieve, but not impossible. You can do it on your own. You'll need to learn a lot, to work day and night, to invest your time in this effort. But you will succeed.

So here you go: choose your keywords wisely. Use them even wiser.

To use keywords means to introduce them into the content of your web pages in a natural manner: not too many, not too few.

Is there a keyword density secret formula? Nope.

There are, however, some guidelines.

No keywords = no placement in the SERPs (search engine result pages). No placement in the SERPs = no traffic. No traffic = no revenue. No revenue = you don't have a business. So invest time and effort in choosing and using keywords.

It is important that your keywords appear in the META tags (page title, meta title, meta description, meta keywords) and the content of the page. However, too many keywords could get your site penalized for spamming. Too few. bring no results.

Each search engine places different importance on keyword density. Google requires a maximum of 3%, Yahoo! needs a 5-6%. Is it safe to go beyond Google's guidelines? Not really. Then what? Place importance on the keyword modifications: bold, italic, type size, underline, highlight, hyperlink. Take care where on page you place the main keywords: the heading, at the beginning of your first paragraph, at the end of the last sentence of your text, in subheadings, in hyperlinks and so on. You do this in a natural, readable manner and you cannot fail.

So don't target too many keywords or keywords phrases: one or two will do. You could even target three if you have a lot of content on one page, but not more. Don't optimize your page for fast results, but for lasting results. Pay attention: if you want to be competitive, focus on one keyword per page and keep its page density to the minimum.

You have a public relations website. Then "public relations" is your keyword phrase. Start optimizing for it. Create sub pages to support the home page optimize those for keyword variations and some related low competitive keywords. Keep your content simple, relevant, useful.and don't stuff it with keywords. That's all you need to know about keyword density.

Not convinced? How about this: Google will change its algorithms soon. Why don't you run a keyword density checker on your website and have a chat with your SEO team or expert? You wouldn't like Google to ban you for keyword stuffing, would you?

About The Author:

Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of http://www.HighPowerSites.com and many other web projects. Get your own website online in
just 5 minutes at http://www.HighPowerSites.com

Keywords - A Guide To Discover A Profitable Web Site Within You

By: Vishy Dadsetan

These series of articles address 33 ways you can use these keywords to the best of your advantage.

The use of keywords are ordered to begin with you and your interests, then your Web site html source codes and tags, then creating highly optimized Web page and targeted content for higher search engine ranking and ends with marketing of Web pages based on your keywords and phrases.

The first use of keywords that I have rarely seen done is to correlate your passions and expertise with marketable products, services and niche Web sites.

Let's begin there and in the future article address the other 32 uses of keywords and phrases.

* Single Most Important Web site Ingredient

What is the single most important ingredient of a successful Web site? Is it Web Design? Web content? Products and prices?

You cannot find the answer in any of those.

The answer is you. You bring life, vibrancy and success to your Web site and not the other way around. Show me any successful Web site and I will show you dozens of failures just like it with better design, more content and cheaper products.

What makes one Web site successful and an identical one a failure? It is the owner, her creativity, hard work, diligence and passion.

That is why the single most important contribution of keywords is to help you explore your experiences and discover your marketable niche.

When we hear that doctors and lawyers are making a ton of money, we don't pretend to be one, do we? Why not? Besides the legal issues, everyone knows it takes 6-10 years of intense study after high school and to become a doctor or a lawyer and don't forget the cost and competition.

Only after all this enormous expenditure of resources, these individuals will be able to help anyone with their health or legal matters. Sometimes even years of training is not enough if the fire of healing is not burning in a doctor's heart or thirst for justice in not in a lawyer's mind. I have to admit that today's society has changed drastically from Dr. Marcus Welby to Nip/Tuck. As a consumer which type of doctor do you prefer?

Keep your answer in mind when you read the next segment.

When it comes to the Internet, as soon as a catchy advertising is shown or a persuasive email is received with couple of snap shots of huge income earned, many jump aboard. They start a Web site and begin the attempt of selling these "wonderful" products or services they really know nothing about.

Their Web sites reflect this lack of knowledge and passion. Consumers deserve our best if we want them as our clients. And with the tremendous exposure they have to thousands of Web sites they are highly educated in what they want. But they are also overwhelmed and they are looking for something that stands out.

We as Web site owners need to understand the same challenges that a brick and mortar business faces and a large part of that is understanding consumers and really taking care of them. If we don't, we are left with the question of what went wrong? Where are the fortunes promised?

Nothing went wrong and the fortunes are there. The harsh reality is that in most cases we chose the products and services to sell without a single thought to our qualification to sell them or our passion to sustain our efforts to make a Web site a success.

*Use Keywords To Qualify Yourself And Serve Your Customers

Let's go back to the role of Keywords in this process.

I believe you should begin by qualifying yourself, discover your expertise and uncover your marketable experiences. The process takes a little time but it is fairly simple and it will serve you as the unique corner stone of your success, which no one else can imitate. This is about finding your path, your keyword and your niche.

To begin, write down your educational experience, your hobbies and most important what you are passionate about.

Then, write down what you have done in the last ten years.

Can you condense what you have done in each of the last ten years in one line? This is not to diminish the value of each year but it is to crystallize the lessons learned.

One line for each year for a total of ten lines. Then take the first line and write down what you had done each month, one line per month for a total of twelve months. Don't worry if you don't remember every little detail. You want to keep it general.

Remember that you are not writing a resume and you are not trying to convince anyone that what you had done is valuable. You as a spiritual being, have an intrinsic value beyond your activities and relationships. This is a process of self-exploration to look at the past and find seeds of success that lay there dormant.

Once the list is done, expand each line to include details of the experience. You will soon find out you have expertise in so many areas you did not even think about. Most people tend to neglect their expertise in an area simply because they have done it so long that it is second nature to them and they do not put value on it.

To help you get started let me give you an example from my own list a few years ago.

Short Version - November 2003 - Replaced the old lawn.

Expanded Version - I live on about an acre of land and this process, replacing the old lawn, took about a month and I hired five people to do the job. My main function was research, since by nature, I needed to know how things worked and I wanted to make sure that I received high quality workmanship.

Over the course of the month, I spent over 40 hours in hands-on training. Many people don't know that a regular college course on a quarterly system is ten weeks and three hours per week for a total of 30 hours and it is not hands-on. Remember that anytime you complete a project that requires more than 40 hours to complete, it is equivalent to taking a college course.

For me, definition of a project is something that you plan, research, act upon and complete.

By the time we were done, I had both more knowledge and practical experience than most people about soil condition, types of lawn, self repairing lawn, over-seeding lawns, the proper irrigation distance, correct drop angle for drainage, trenching equipment, lawn lighting and a dozen other things.

Now that I had my "one liners", let's look at the words I used to describe the action. In this case the most common word was "lawn." So I check the demand for that keyword and this is what I found.

The marketable demand for many of these items is huge. For example, just the keyword lawn has the following consumer keywords and related demands, 27467 lawn care, 4709 lawn ornament, 4456 lawn equipment, 3685 Christmas decoration lawn, 3455 lawn maintenance, 2488 lawn sprinkler, 2046 lawn decoration, 1583 lawn fertilizer, 1372 lawn aerator, 1000 lawn mowing, 952 lawn sprinkler system, 757 lawn irrigation, 666 lawn roller.

Now, because of my personal experience, I could provide real help and practical advice for most people with their problems in many of these areas and I have for my friends. I could write content, start a blog, point to solutions and products. In simple terms, I am now partially qualified to sell products related to the above terms. But by the same token, I still don't know anything about lawn mowers, or lawn tractors and I am not qualified to offer advice about these.

When looking at keywords, I ask myself, am I really qualified to help anyone by giving them advise about lawn tractors or lawn mowers. If the answer is no, then I move to the next keyword or if I am passionate about it I spend the time to acquire the expertise.

* No Heart - No Web site

Will I now rush to create a lawn Web site? Of course not. That is not my passion. I am not even remotely interested in the subject. I may at some point write an article about Bermuda grass and lawn fungus that has cost me more money and effort than any other thing related to lawns. I just mentioned this so that you know each experience has a tangible marketable value if you really look at it.

When you plan to spend a few hours a day on a Web site, you should do something that you are passionate about. I emphasize passion because expertise can be obtained but passion has to be there.

Above was an example of what is possible when you can really look at one experience from a marketing point of view and I hope it can help you crystallize the past and begin harvesting the fruits that it has brought you.

When I look at my list, writing in all its variations is a huge part of my activities. Every month I spend money on books to read, books on how to write, books on grammar, dictation, origin of words. Writing and writing related activities occupy a third of my daily activities and of course it shows up on every list I make for every month of the year going back more years than I like to count.

Now, if you were me and had to choose between a Web site that has to do with lawns and a Web site that has to do with writing, which will you start?

Alas, I am still far from the writer I want to be so I do not even pretend to be a writer or give advice on it. Instead I use my passion for writing to create content for Web sites. I have found my niche and I hope these ideas can help you find your niche as well.

I want to leave you with a quote from Malcolm S. Forbes who once said, "The biggest mistake people make in life is not making a living at doing what they most enjoy."

To see real life examples on how others have turned their passion into profitable Internet business, check out http://www.askdomain.com/web-hosting/business-web-hosting.html

About The Author: For additional information visit:
http://www.just-search-engines.com,
http://www.just-web-marketing.com, and
http://www.askdomain.com.

SEO Web Content: Good Writing, Good Business

By Joel Walsh

There's a deadly myth about search engine optimization and writing for the web: that good SEO and good writing don't go together.

As a website copywriter, I hear this myth repeated back to me all the time by new clients and prospects. "Don't bother search-engine-optimizing the content," they say. "Just make sure it is well written and the keywords will flow naturally into the content." Or, they repeat the words of so many self-styled gurus: "don't write for the search engines, write for the people who will be reading what you write."

If you're one of the people who believe there's a conflict of interest between search engines and humans, you're operating under two misconceptions:

* Misconception 1: you know more about what people want to read on the web than the search engines do.

* Misconception 2: you or your writer will just naturally write the content that people or search engines want, without consciously trying to meet their demands.

Why Search Engines Know More about Your Website Visitors than You

"I want a well-written web page, not a list of keywords." It frightens me a bit when I hear this, since it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what search engines do.

A search engine is not simply a massive find function, like the one in the "Edit" menu of Microsoft applications. It does not just pull up any page that has the keyword in it X number of times. If it did, all pages that show up on search engine results would simply contain a list of the keywords.

Ultimately, writing for the search engines means writing for web surfers. Think about it: services like Google thrive on giving people the pages they want to read. If they consistently failed to give people what they wanted, people would stop using them.

What Your Website's Visitors Want to Read

Most of the time, people don't want to read on the web. Reading on a screen hurts the eyes. It doesn't help that a lot of web pages make it harder with text that's too small, backgrounds that are colored rather than white, and lots of extraneous graphics.

Besides, when it comes to reading matter, there is an overabundance of choice on the web, more than any library on earth. Of that, an unfortunate amount isn't worth reading. Time must be rationed.

In fact, people treat a web page much as a search engine does: they scan it. In particular, they scan it for the keywords they entered into the search engine. If they arrived via a link from another website, they are still looking for words and phrases related to their interest--which are generally the same as the keywords people enter into search engines.

In short, Nobel-prize-winning literature makes bad web content. You have to write specifically for the web. That's why the web hasn't fueled much of a resurgence in the short story or other literary writing, dashing many hopes. Ebook versions of paper books have also disappointed expectations.

Newspapers are the only paper publications that have made a smooth online transition, precisely because they are written in short, to-the-point paragraphs that are easy to scan.

Still Think Good SEO Web Content Makes for Bad Reading?

You've just read almost to the end of a piece of search-engine-optimized web content. This article was optimized for the keywords, "SEO," "search engine," "search engines," "keyword," "keywords," "search engine optimization," and "writing."

The keywords were present in headings and throughout the content. The content itself is easy to scan: paragraphs of one-three sentences, broken up by sub-headings every four paragraphs or so.

Naturally, those keywords are too broad for this page to have a chance of ranking high in search engines for them. But this page will get some of the atypical search keywords that account for as many as half of all searches. So, if someone types in a phrase like, "keyword writing search engine optimized content," this page would have a pretty good chance of showing up.

To be sure, this article is on the long side for a web page. Most people won't even scan more than 600 words of text; 250-500 is ideal.

But this article is destined primarily to be shown in an email newsletter, where attention spans are longer since people are more confident the source of the content can be trusted to repay their investment of time. Besides, as a well-structured page, it can be split into two or three pages according to the subheadings.

In short, there's much more to writing well for the web than just writing well. If you've had enough sense to have your web content written professionally, have enough sense to take the advice of most website copywriters: search-engine-optimization for keywords and good web writing are the same thing.

About The Author:

Joel Walsh is a professional content writer and founder of UpMarket Content, whose site offers information on getting great website content.

Key Words In Searches

By John Fowler

One of the things we don't seem to have much of these days is time. Everyone rushes everywhere and communication is compressed into new shorter forms like all of the text messages I receive, I still don't get all of the abbreviations. There is a danger that this short, fast communication is carried over into web sites we develop. All short, bulleted points lacking any grammar or sentence construction, and as I have said before search engines seem to like well-constructed grammatical sentences.

However, there is another knock-on effect of shortening text and that is the effect it has on key words. I am not really talking about the meta tag keywords here, but the words in the text that the search engines find multiple times. This is often known as key word density i.e. what percentage of the text is taken up by a single word or multi-word phrase. Have you ever considered this in writing your own code? Have you thought yourself very clever, by managing to get 100 instances of your key word in one A4 page?

Having your keywords and phrases sprinkled throughout the text is obviously good, but how can you ensure you don't overdo it. Well, one way is to spend time creating a more lengthy piece of well-written text. This will mean that although you still have lots of key words and phrases in there, their relative density is reduced because of the greater overall volume of text.

We have a number of domains that we run purely to test theories on topics like key word density. By creating multiple pages with similar overall information, but written differently, we can test how the different search engines treat different key word densities. Just a note of warning, don't try this at home. You can actually be sandboxed (your site held in limbo) for having duplicate pages on a single domain. So being able to calculate how similar pages are to one another is important when doing this.

Finally, just a word on meta tag keywords. The importance attached by search engines to keywords specified in the meta tag has greatly reduced due to the overuse of this feature. Many sites I have seen have tried to use the same keywords over and over again. Our advice is to choose these words carefully and use maybe 4 or 5, but don't go over board. Then try and use them throughout the actual page text, but without forcing the density. After all, if they really are your key words, then using them in the text should come naturally.

And now a poem reflecting web page writing techniques.

If I write half a page
and you write thirty four
I can use three keywords
whilst you get forty more
I can be brief and concise
and speedily spit pages out
but your one and only masterpiece
Carries far more clout,
I am but a comic strip
to your Tolstoyan drama
I am all wild excitement
whilst you are perfect karma,
I have few words to play with
to juggle in a subtle key
whilst you have an epic
to aid keyword density
the old bull takes his time
never rushing, always serene
he has created multiple options
whilst young bull was over keen,
so when you code your pages
don't undersell your wording
or you'll be virtually alone
when you should be herding,
ten keywords in a thousand
dilutes the trend to oversell
and makes the reader relax
from the instinct he can tell
that a little page is but a ploy
to put him onto a sales hook,
whereas an interesting article
is worth a second look.

About The Author:

John Fowler trained as a Mathematican and has worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, much of the time in sales related functions. He now spends his time between being a partner in SEO Gurus and as a sales and management trainer for ICT companies. John can be contacted via http://www.seogurus.co.uk

How Many Keywords Are Too Many?

By Matthew Rotterman

Let us suppose that you have a new website that you want to launch and you have a little knowledge of how Internet search engines work. You know that these keyword rich articles dramatically help to boost your search engine rankings. Search engine algorythms love keyword dense articles and this has been a proven strategy for some time now. Experienced website masters have been using these keyword rich articles for a long time.

You decide to find the keywords that are most searched for, related to the topic of your website. You can easily find these lists on the search engine websites telling you what people have been searching for recently in a given area of interest. People have told you that article lengths can vary but to generally keep them under 1,200 words so that the readers do not get bored and feel like they are reading a book. So, now you have your list of the top 100 keywords that people are searching for in your topic area and you have decided how long you want the articles to be.

Now you contact a writer to write these keyword rich articles for you. The writer will likely ask you what density you want to use on these articles. This is where it gets tricky!

The truth is that people are usually guessing as to what the best density is to use when writing keyword rich articles. However, most have agreed that keeping the densities in the neighborhood of 3-7% is about right. One thing that I have seen people try to do though is that since they came up with a list of 100 keywords they only want to pay to have 25 of them written. So they decide to cram keyword phrases into each article. An extreme case would
be using 4 keyword phrases in a single article. If the article is 1,000 words long and each phrase is 2 words long we are looking at a total of 8 words. Now lets suppose that the density is 5%
for each phrase. This means that each word of the phrases will be used 50 times each. 50 times 4 are 200 of the total words in a 1,000-word article. This is 20% of the article dedicated to
keywords and only keywords. This may not sound like a lot, but when you see it in print you will realize that it is a very large amount of keywords. This put you from a 5% density to a 20%
density by cramming extra keyword phrases into the article.

The end result is that you may get the keyword density you are looking for but at what price? The readability of such an article will be poor to say the least. Even the most experienced and well qualified writer will have difficulty getting that many keyword phrases into one article. A writer will be forced to put at least one keyword phrase in almost every sentence of the article in order to meet the density requirement.

The idea behind the keyword rich articles is to improve search engine rankings and to get people to go to your website and purchase your product or services. If the reader comes there and sees a poorly written article that is chock full of keywords and little information, the reader is likely to look elsewhere for the information that he or she was seeking. Just because you CAN
put a bunch of keywords in an article does not mean that you SHOULD.

When I do searches on the Internet I steer away from obviously keyword heavy articles and towards articles that actually provide relevant information. There is a needed balance between the density of the keywords and the readability of the articles that you are having written for your website. If you are ranked #1 in the search engine rankings but no one visits your site because there is not valuable content on your website, then being ranked #1 is rather pointless.

Try not to get caught up in the formulas that people suggest for keyword densities and always keep in mind that these articles will ultimately be read by a human being who is searching for
information. If you are able to provide that quality information, then the reader is more apt to purchase your product or services.

Search engine rankings are very important, but they are not the cure all.

About the Author:

Matthew Rotterman is a writer and editor at: KeywordText.com.
"Keyword Text" managed to bring together several writers and
editors to provide a few low-cost writing services for those who
are working hard to become more profitable. They offer Content
Creation Services which include: Exclusive WebPage Content,
Reprint Articles, and Newsletter Creation and Development
services. Volume Discounts. Compare us to our competition, you
will be surprised. http://keywordtext.com/dir.pl/ktc/index.html

The What, How, And Why Of Keyword Densities

By Matthew Rotterman

Keyword density is an important concept for website owners to understand. Keyword density, in today's Internet, is what will ultimately improve your search engine optimization (SEO)ranking. The importance of having a high SEO rating is absolutely critical if you wish to have high volumes of traffic to your website.

Let's talk first about SEO and what it does. If you type a search into google, yahoo, MSN, or any other major search engine there are likely to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of results come up on the search engine. So let us imagine that you sell ceramic dolls on your website. Now someone types "ceramic dolls" into a search engine, where in those thousands of website results does your website fall? Does your website rank on the first page? If you are like most websites, your ranking is probably somewhere in the depths of the results ranking well over number 1,000. Imagine a customer seeking what you sell, but not being able to find your business. Do you really think that someone is going to sift through the first 1,000 results to find yours?

Search engine optimization (SEO) simply means that you are going to employ methods that will move your website up in the search engines results for "ceramic dolls" or your own personal keywords. Research and common sense tells us that if a potential website visitor/customer does not find your website within the first 20 results, he or she will move on and try a new search or simply use one of the first 20 websites that he or she has found. This is where keyword density comes into play.

In years past I can remember finding web pages that had hundreds of words listed at the bottom of the page, this was a common practice. The reason for this was so that the search engines would place this website on the results page if a web surfer typed in any of those hundreds of words. Times have changed and so have search engines. Today the search engines are much more sophisticated in how they locate websites to list in their results.

Keyword articles (adhering to certain keyword densities) dramatically improve a websites SEO ranking. Going back to our ceramic dolls example, this site would want a keyword article
written with the keywords "ceramic dolls" inside the article. This way when a web surfer types in "ceramic dolls," the site will come up much higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP's).

The search engines use certain algorithms that "read" these keywords for the surfer. If you go and type in any phrase into a search engine you will notice that the results show those keywords highlighted in bold. They show you how the keywords are listed in those web pages. Placing articles on your website that contain the keywords your customers are looking for will help your search engine ranking for these specific keywords.

Now, you cannot simply type the "ceramic dolls" over and over again on the same web page. With the sophistication of today's search engines, doing that would actually harm your search engine ranking. You need to provide articles that not only contain the keywords, but articles that also contain some relevant information as well.

There is great debate over what density to use in a keyword article. Suppose you want a 500-word article written on ceramic dolls. What percentage of the time (density) should the phrase "ceramic dolls" be used? Should it be in there 4% (20 times) of the time, 7%, or 12%? You must be careful because using the keywords too often hurts your rankings, while using too little doesn't improve your ranking enough. So what is the answer? The answer is that only those that develop the algorithms for the search engine companies actually know.........and they aren't talking. Most people use anywhere from 3%- 15% keyword densities.

Some people believe that having the keyword phrase in the title and as the first word of every paragraph helps. Some believe that using "dolls that are ceramic" 18 times and "ceramic dolls" 2 times in a 500-word article with 4% density will work.

Here is what everyone does know, if you are not utilizing keyword rich articles on your website (regardless of the density you choose) you will not be very highly ranked in any of the search engines. Keyword rich articles are one of the best ways to advertise your site. If you want more visitors to your website, who translate into more customers, you must utilize keyword articles to improve your search engine rankings so that people can find your website.

About the Author:

Matthew Rotterman is a writer and editor at: KeywordText.com. "Keyword Text" managed to bring together several writers and editors to provide a few low-cost writing services for those who are working hard to become more profitable. They offer Content Creation Services which include: Exclusive WebPage Content, Reprint Articles, and Newsletter Creation and Development services. Volume Discounts. Compare us to our competition, you will be surprised. http://keywordtext.com/dir.pl/ktc/index.html

The Five Ways You Should Be Using Keywords

By George Peirson

We have all read lots of articles on how to gather keywords, how to compile a huge keyword list, how to make these keywords relevant to our web site. But exactly what do we do with all these keywords once we have them?

Knowing where and how you can use your keywords will greatly improve the efficiency of your search engine optimization.

There are 5 places in a web page where you can use keywords:

The Title Tag
The Keyword Meta Tag
The Description Meta Tag
Alt Tags for images
Body copy on the page

Of these the page Body Copy, the readable text on the page, is the single most important place for your keywords. More about this later.

Let's first take a look at the Title Tag. This is one of the tags in the head section of the html code of your web page and lists the title that is displayed in the web browser. For instance, Internet Explorer displays this tag in the top bar of the browser window. But there are other uses for the Title Tag as well. Most search engines will index this tag for information about your site and many search engines will use this tag as the title of your listing.

In general you can use from 60 to 115 characters in a Title Tag. The Tag can include the company name, especially if it is a well known company, and should include your most important keywords. Consider this a short description of your web page. One more thing, the Title Tag is also used as the link when the URL is saved into a web browser favorites list.

The Keyword Meta Tag used to be the main way search engines indexed your page. Now-a-days many search engines will simply ignore this tag, but that may not always stay the case. Some search engines still take s look at this tag to help categorize your site. There is no reason not to have this tag on your page, just in case. You are not penalized for including a Keyword Meta Tag.

The keywords should be separated by a comma. Put more specific keywords first then put the less important and general keywords later on. Search engines no longer pay attention to the case of a keyword, so the keywords can all be lower case. I have seen recommendations of 25 keywords or 1000 characters in the list. In general Keyword pairs or triplets are better than single keywords. I try to have one or two lines of keywords if I use this tag.

The Description Meta Tag is slowly joining the Keywords Meta Tag on the lack of support list. But right now it is still a valuable place to use your keywords. Many search engines will look at the description Meta tag for keywords to compare against your body copy. Yahoo goes one step further and will use your description tag as the description of your site in their listings.

Consider the description tag just like it is named, a concise description of your site. Keep it to a short paragraph, under 50 words.

Alt tags are text descriptions that are included with the code used to display images on a page. Basically an Alt tag is the Alternate Text version of the image in case the image is not displayed. Alt tags are important for creating a fully accessible site for people who use screen reader technology that reads the page out loud through their computer speakers. Obviously an image cannot be read aloud, but the Alt tag can.

Alt tags are also displayed as a quick popup when you "hover" your mouse pointer over an image. Many search engines, including Google, will index the Alt tags along with the rest of the body copy, making these ideal places to slip in a few more keywords. Just keep in mind that the text should accurately reflect the content of the image. Plus don't use Alt tags on images that would not normally be read out loud, such as separator lines or bullets.

This brings us to the main place to use your keywords, the body copy on the page, the text that your visitors are reading when they visit your site. The major search engines will no longer give you a top placement just for having the most instances of a particular keyword on your page. They will give top listing to what they believe is the most relevant page on a topic.

Your job is to work your keyword into the text frequently, but appropriately. Select one or two keywords and make the page specifically about those keywords. Think of yourself giving a PowerPoint presentation to an audience of your best customers. Your PowerPoint slides will be your paragraphs. They should be concise and to the point, using your keywords to drive home your point. And, just like in a PowerPoint presentation, you can use bulleted lists to call out the several benefits of your site or product, each time relating it to your selected keyword.

So use your keywords appropriately on your site and use them where you can. This will greatly increase your search engine effectiveness.

Article copyright 2005 George Peirson

About The Author:

George Peirson is the CEO of How To Gurus. He is the author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles. To see training sets and other articles by George Peirson visit http://www.howtogurus.com

10 Ways to Tackle Keyword Research and Selection

By Michael Murray

Effective keyword research requires many steps that go beyond your web site. It starts by knowing how your potential customers search.

You need to be extremely careful with keyword research so that you don't miss excellent opportunities or aim so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Here are 10 strategies to guide you along the way:

1. Know your potential customers.

We can't tell you how many businesses we've met who simply pick keywords out of thin air. They don't talk to customers or hot prospects in order to determine what might be a useful set of keywords.

2. Start with core words.

A core set of keywords - even if too broad - can stimulate creative thinking.

3. Look at the industry.

Examine industry trade group web sites and related newsletters to find potential keywords.

4. Study competitors.

Some companies make a bigger deal of competitors' keywords than they should, but it's still a useful strategy. Invariably, a competitor will be using a strong keyword or phrase you don't want to miss. Often, however, they load their web sites with single keywords that aren't appropriate. If internet users are seeking cookware, their search terms shouldn't be laundry-based words. Yet we came across that very example. Be careful which words you use.

5. Be specific - add other words to your primary phrases.

If you sell metal, try metal stamping or metal stampers. Or, how about metal stamping companies? Words like services, companies, products, accessories, and many others can really pay off. Ok, everyone wants to rank #1 for terms like "toys" and "sports." It would take more time and budget than you may have to land such terms (through META updates, content adjustments and links).

6. Visit Wordtracker.

WordTracker is a great tool even if it only collects a sampling of actual searches (more than 300 million). You'll get a good sense of how frequently someone may search.

7. Use your intuition.

Don't hesitate to try some ideas; Wordtracker and other sources can confirm whether you have a search term people might or might not use.

8. Limit your selection.

Come up with a list of words - 10, 20, 30, maybe 50 or more. But don't get so many that you can't manage them all.

9. Tie keywords to site planning.

Pick keywords you can work with over time. Make sure you don't plan to drop a page from the web site or change it so often that your target keywords may be knocked off or irrelevant every 30 days.

10. Study your log files.

Web analytics is a great tool if you want to see how your visitors are searching. Study the results and you will come up with a revised set of keywords.

About the Author:

Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a search engine optimization firm in Cleveland, Ohio. A member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), he also authored the white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game."

Keywords, Competition and Being Number One - Uncovering the Algorithm

By John Krycek

By following these steps you will see that most closely guarded secret-- the search algorithm. Remember the movie "the Matrix?" The Matrix is there, you just can't see it. So is the search algorithm.

It's easy to pay a Search Engine Optimizer to give your pages some ranking power. Unfortunately, given the inherent time factor involved in climbing the ranks, your money may be long gone before you know if you've spent your money well.

THERE IS NO MAGIC PILL

Forget any advertisement you see for instant number one search results or automated this or that. Most are scams, and the ones that aren't might get you positioned, but it will be very short lived.

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Achieving and maintaining a high rank, especially on highly competitive keywords, requires constant maintenance. If you do find a legitimate SEO firm, it is well worth the money to pay their monthly maintenance fee and let them continue to help you after the initial project. At least for 6 months or a year as you establish yourself.

In this article we'll look at some of the intricate and complex tasks of optimizing a page for long term ranking power. You will learn how to read between the code and the content to find what is necessary to bring you to the top. Being number one is easy to say, but is quickly overwhelming when you stare at tens of thousands of pages you want to out rank. So how do you begin?

The starting line on the road to that first page SERP (search engine results page) ranking is not as blurry as you might think. In fact, you can uncover the starting line, the route, and all the scenery along the way to the finish line without knowing the search engine algorithm.

STEP 1- YOUR KEYWORDS ARE THE CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT OF GRUELLING DAYS OF WORK

If you have investments in the stock market you know how much research and thought goes into choosing those securities. Now take that same effort and multiply it by three. That's how much planning and revision your keywords should take.

A simple, broad key phrase like "shoes" could hypothetically bring you up in a countless stream of different searches. Women's shoes, baby shoes, sneakers, high heels, etc. If somehow you manage to settle into a good ranking (which would be difficult) you would have more traffic on your site than you could handle. But traffic is worthless is it doesn't get to it's destination. Chances are, you weren't that destination.

Your keywords must be focused and precise, specific to what you are selling. Using a key phrase like "Gucci mens black leather loafer" will bring a targeted lead to your site. You may not reach as many people as the more generalized keyword, but the people that do come to you have a much deeper interest in the specific product you are selling.

Therefore you have much greater chance of converting that targeted lead to a sale. Your keywords are your magic beans, your winning lotto numbers, your energizer bunnies, your sales force, whatever you want to call them. They must be perfect.

STEP 2- WANT TO BE NUMBER ONE? LOOK AT WHO ALREADY IS

Competition Analysis- no SEO book can give you this information.

Now take your keyword list and type them into a search engine. Who comes up in the first ten results? That company that is number one is because they have most closely matched what the search engine algorithm says should be number one. You can learn a great deal from them.

A. INTERNAL FACTORS

Take that number one page, and the other top 9 pages and study them, look at the code, break them down. You are looking at the first half of what is needed to rank in the top 10 pages for your key phrases on that particular search engine. The list of what to look for is enormous.

Studying the Internal Factors on a page is taking it apart to see how it's put together. Not how it works, but statistical research into the precise construct and layout of keywords and phrases in relation to each other within the page.

Start with these areas:

URL address, Page Title, Meta description, Meta Keywords, First sentence on the page, Body copy, Bold or Emphasized Phrases, H1 or other tags, Alt Tags, Navigation system

In each of those sections, look at:

Keyword densities- the number of times your phrase and each word in your phrase appears compared to the text around it

Where and in how many times the same phrase and words appear in different sections

The word and character position of each phrase in each

The total number of characters

The total number of words

The quality and thought of the content

Beginning with these comparisons should keep you quite busy for a while. A spreadsheet is quite useful. Some commercial products are also available that can make this daunting task much more feasible. Keep looking for other patterns and differences. You want to duplicate them in your own page. NOT copy and steal. You want to mimic the patterns that are bringing that page to the position it is. Then move onto to examining the external factors of these pages.

B. EXTERNAL FACTORS

External factors of a web page deal with the links to, from and within a web page, both inside the same site, and out into the web. This analysis usually takes more time because it involves more dissection of pages beyond the one you're trying to optimize. In this analysis as with Internal Factors, you want to compare and contrast your page versus the top 10 competitors, find similarities and differences. Here is a list of criteria to get you started.

Number of internal (to the same site) on that page

Number of external links

Number of links pointing TO that page* (see below for details)

The link/anchor text- which keywords are used and where

Google Page Rank value of incoming links

Alexa Rank of incoming links

*To get a listing of the links that point to a site, type the following into Google, MSN and Yahoo searches: "link:www.domainname.com". Google tends to only show a small portion of the links back, but MSN and Yahoo will give you much more pertinent data.

Now you want to compare the content on each of these pages to the one they point to. Is it of similar theme, in what context does the link back appear and where. Subject of much debate, the consensus is that Google Page Rank does not mean what it used to. However, if it is in some fashion a measure of how significant or "important" a site is, it is worth looking more closely at the sites that link back that are of high page rank.

EVEN A SURGEON USES TOOLS

Now, this is definitely a ton of work to do all by hand. There are software programs that can help do some of the digging and mathematical computations for you, figuring out densities and organizing information.

Tools like this are definitely ones a professional SEO will have in their arsenal. But remember, these are tools, not miracle workers. It takes a human being to evaluate and realize connections, similarities, draw conclusions and interpret the data. Then, you have to extrapolate this data.

Remember, you want to do one better than every site you just examined. To do that you have to draw some conclusions and make some educated guesses and link to even better sites.

FINAL THOUGHTS

You have access to the inner workings of every page that you want to beat. Learn from them and do one better. This process is not a one-time shot. It is ongoing. Check your key phrases every week. Do the same people still rank in the top ten?

Some have probably moved. Remember too that they're going to adapt to maintain their positions too. If you want the ranks, you have to spend the time, and not just once, or pay someone to do it for you.

Don't ever believe anyone who says they can guarantee any kind of results. And ask them how they will optimize your pages. If they explain to you something like the above, then you've probably got yourself someone experienced and honest. You money will be well spent and you'll quickly recover it.

About the Author:

John Krycek is the owner and creative director of theMouseworks.ca web design
in Toronto. Learn more about search engine optimization and internet marketing in easy, non-technical, up front English!

How To Select Keywords For Search Engine Optimization

By Evelyn Lim

Selecting the correct keywords can make or break your website. Potential customers search the web for desired sites, and if your website doesn't have the keywords they're looking for, they'll miss you.

Determining keywords is an art; it's best to work backwards. What would a customer search for if they were looking for your site? You literally have to put yourself in the consumer's place and let go of your preconceived notions about what you think your keywords are. You should remember when writing your site that you need to use words that are not only related to your content, but are popular search words as well. This is called keyword optimization, or choosing the most searched keywords related to your content.

Spend some time listing all of the words and phrases that are related to your website content. Get ideas from everyone you can think of and list them all. Visit competitors' sites and see what meta tags they use. After this research, you are ready to develop your own keyword phrases.

There are several sites designed to assist you in keyword optimization. Here are a few of the free ones:-

The Overture Keyword Tool (http://www.inventory.overture.com ) lists searches related to the keyword you provide. This took is great for expanding your list.

Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) helps identify keywords that will help your ranking on search engines. Wordtracker also gives you other keyword combinations that you may have overlooked.

The Keyword Tumbler (http://www.keywordtumbler.com) takes your existing keyword phrases and mixes it up to form new phrases and variations that you can include in your meta tags.

A great website is not so great if no one finds it. Remember to research your keywords carefully from the consumer's viewpoint and then sit back and watch the traffic roll in!

About The Author:

Evelyn Lim is a publisher of the popular newsletter "Mapping You to Success" aimed at the aspiring home based internet business owner. She also hopes to educate her readers on acquiring multiple sources of online income. Please visit her site at http://www.e-BizMap.com for more information.