One of the fundamental tasks for creating a website that attracts traffic from Google and the common search engines is selecting useful and descriptive keywords for your effort. A good term or phrase that accurately describes your product or service or presents the “need” your company serves is essential to building your website into a sales and marketing tool.
At start up, most enterprises don’t invest time in researching what keywords would work for the organization. That or the process is simply not accomplished. As keywords help search engines to understand the content of your page though, ignoring keyword selection may mean turning away visitors and customers from your business website.
But what really are ‘keywords?’ The keyword list is found in a section of the webpage that the viewer doesn’t generally see. The ‘keyword metatags’ provide words and phrases to the search engines that describe what your page is about. Readers can’t see the meta tags unless they look at the page source code.
The more important function of keywords though is that they describe the business as well as page content. Keyword phrases that appear within the page provide assurance to Google and the other search engines that the keywords accurately represent what the page is about.
Keyword phrases, once identified, should be used in the page title, page headlines and reasonably placed throughout the text. Overuse of keywords is awkward and counter-productive as the search engines may see this as something they term ‘keyword stuffing.’ Pages they believe are overstuffed with keywords are devalued in the search engine algorithms or simply de-indexed.
The process for selecting keywords can take many forms. Google provides a tool within the Adwords suite that helps evaluate keywords and provides the number of possible searches or ‘impressions’ that a top Google (paid) advertisement could be expected to make. This is useful information even though you are not paying for an advertisement on these pages.
Avoid keywords that have a great deal of competition in Google Adwords. The same Adwords tool will display how much competition there is for a keyword or keyword phrase. Although not universally true, these keywords take longer to compete for and to rank well – especially for newer pages.
At the point you identify a good keyword or phrase, use it in a Google search. If major corporate websites are returned as the number one result, you may want to keep refining your keywords. Companies such as Bank of America are not going to let go of their dominant search ranking position easily. (Having said that, there are ways to compete with the big boys, so keep reading.) At the outset, one probably wants to avoid going head-to-head with major companies for broad and popular search terms.
Choosing effective keywords and phrases then is an art form that identifies a creative and descriptive phrase that describes your page as well as your business. The other part of the art is to identify one of these terms that generates traffic but has fewer big companies competing for it. A good and efficient keyword phrase then is one that has a good amount of internet traffic but isn’t heavily competed for.
The Google Adwords system displays a ‘traffic’ number, but these are not exact number of searches or exposures that this search term produces. This tool is useful though for understanding which terms have more or fewer searches than others.
A certain degree of creativity is also helpful. Organizations that do business in a particular geographic area can use the name of that area in their keyword phrases. Setting one’s business apart from others by using a geographic term (such as “Banks in Birmingham” as opposed to just “Banks”) is a good way to compete with larger organizations. Large companies typically don’t compete well on a local level. Users though, won’t search for a term as broad as “Banks” but will usually restrict their search to a local relevant area.
Flexibility and willingness to try new phrases are important in keyword selection. Terms that may look great during the research phase may turn out to be total duds. Buyer behavior can be a scientific study that borders on the bizarre, so don’t be surprised if your great keyword term generates little traffic. There exist no rules for consumer behavior and logic frequently seems to be defied. Trial, error (and trial and error) may be necessary to identify the proper set of keywords that attract traffic and business to your web page. Still, when a business is in the start up phase or pre-growth stage, what better time would there be to find the right set of keywords that work for your company.
SEO Consultants in Denver brings many years of experience in link building, keyword selection and website optimization to assist companies win new sales. SEO Consultants Denver quickly deliver top page search engine rankings even for new pages.
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