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Keywords — Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines
There are three ways to figure out your keywords: Ask Your Competitors This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites like yours. Open the top site, and once the home page has downloaded, click on “View” in your browser, and then “Source”. That will reveal all the HTML used to build the web page, including all the keywords that have been specially inserted. Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site. Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lots of other keywords that aren’t obviously listed, such as “vitamins” for example. You can repeat the process on other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty long list. Ask the Pay-Per-Clicks
Use a Specialized Tool Not too surprisingly, a number of companies have popped up to supply specific keyword services for a fee. The best of these is WordTracker.com . They’re not bargain basement, but you get what you pay for. They’ll give you all the keywords you need and in my experience, they’re a sound investment.
GoogleFight.com is another useful tool to see whether one keyword is more popular than another. The site compares two keywords and tells you which is more popular. It’s free and has a limited use, but it’s fun to play with. As you make up your list of keywords, bear in mind that it’s also worth looking at key phrases. It’s quite possible that a user looking to buy flowers online might search for “red roses” or “cheap bouquets” as well as just “flowers”. Key phrases are often overlooked by competitors, so you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting a high placement with the right combination. Don’t worry too much about the competition though. Some people will tell you that you’re better off trying to find keywords that no one else has thought of and others will tell you to throw in keywords that are only slightly relevant to your businesses. In my experience, that’s a waste of time. If your competitors are using certain keywords, it’s because they know they work. And if any of your visitors found your site using irrelevant keywords, you're not going to sell them anything. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here: just try to figure out the most popular keywords and the best key phrases to put on your site. Whichever of these methods you use — and I tend to use more than one — you should end up with a pretty comprehensive list of keywords that you can stick into your website. The next question then, is how do you use them? When a search engine assigns relevancy to a site, it looks for the keywords in a number of specific areas. Title Tag
The title tag is usually between 50 and 80 characters including spaces. Different search engines have different limits so you want to make sure that your most important words are near the beginning of the title. The rest of the title is made up of keywords and phrases but in fact, you don’t want to put in too many keywords here. Just place one keyword as the second or third word in the title. Too many, and your site could be seen as spamming. You can also list more keywords in the <META Keywords> and <META description> sections of the <HEAD> area, but because these areas have been so abused in the past, a number of search engines today will skip right past the title tag and go straight to the web copy.
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When a user enters a search
term, also known as a “keyword”,
The title tag is written in the
<HEAD> section of the web page
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