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Keywords

If you're planning to promote your site successfully, your keywords and phrases that you select will be the most important step you will make. If you choose the wrong phrases and keywords, you won't receive the traffic you're expecting. If you don't get the traffic, you don't sell. Follow these steps correctly and you'll produce the results you need.

Creating Your List

The best way to do it without buying tons of software, and it seems to work very well, is to take advantage of some free on-line services. Surf over to WordTracker and click on their keyword trial. A new page will come up where you can enter some keywords. Click submit and get many more suggestions.

Remove all the words like if, and, but, the, etc. Remove words that have anything to do with the internet like web, service, internet, etc. These words are too common and will only draw your page deeper into millions of other pages. Remove anything else that wouldn't make sense as a keyword or phrase. What's left, is words that may bring traffic to your site. List them all on one line each. Add any words that may not be spelled correctly or mistyped.

For instance if you're selling lawnmowers, you may want to include lawnmores. Once you have a list, rearrange them in order of priority with the most important ones at the top. You should also try to join some of them together to make phrases or add other words to them. You may end up with a lot more keywords and phrases then you can use in a single submission, so keep them to create "doorway" pages.

Only use the same keywords no more then 3 times. Using more then that means you could be penalized. That means, you could be placed thousands of pages away from your target or totally ignored. Since you're allowed up to 200 keywords in a page Meta tag, don't be shy, use them. Just don't place identical keywords next to each other, spread them out a bit. If they're placed one after the other, you may be accused of spamming the words.

Take turns moving the keywords in different orders and save the page as that keyword name. Make sure you use that keyword in your title tag and as a heading in your main text. Add a link including your keywords at the bottom of the page, and link it to your home page.

Target Your Buyers

Through experience and lots of mistakes, we've found that you need to target a specific group to get a good listing in the Top 10 of each engine. If you use a very large list of keywords, your placement moves lower down the engine list. Using a limited number of keywords increases the density of those few keywords in relevance to your page content and therefore puts your page high up the list.

You have to sit back and pretend you're the customer looking for your product. Just don't think about what your product "is", think about what it "does".

We'll use the lawnmower as an example again. Not everyone looking for a lawnmower is going to type in "lawnmower" in the search engines. They ask thinks like... How can I cut grass? What's the best thing to cut grass? How do I cut grass correctly? Etc.

Here, you've already created a short phrase that will get you a lot of traffic. If you notice, "cut grass" appears in all three inquiries. Now you have to use this to your advantage. Make sure "cut grass" appears in several places on your page. Include "cut grass" in your description and key word Meta tags. Name your file cut_grass.htm. The title of your page should read... Cut Grass Now!, or something to that effect. Get my drift?

Doorway Pages

This is where the doorway pages come in. I realize that this file isn't called index.htm like you would like it to be. However, this page can have all of the characteristics that your home page does. It's identical to your home page except for some keywords and a little modification in the content, description, and title. As far as your visitors are concerned, this IS your home page.

Most engines will allow up to 5 pages a day to be submitted using various keywords but we recommend only 1 per day per site.

Plural & Case

Always add the plural equivalent to all your keywords and phrases. The example above, "cut grass" should also appear as "cuts grass". If using singular keywords like "lawnmower", you don't have to repeat it. Just say "lawnmowers". If someone still enters "lawnmower" in their search, your "lawnmowers" will still come up.

Some engines still use case sensitive searches so you may want to included some of these as well.