Keywords 101
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. SEO Consultants in Denver have been through this process before and have developed the following guidelines to help small business and start ups select keywords that get results.
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.
Keywords are essentially descriptive terms – usually single words or a couple of multi word phrases – that describe what the business page is about. Keywords are stored in ‘metatags’ on the web page and aren’t generally seen unless a user views the source code for the page.
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.
Once useful keywords and terms are identified, they should be installed within the page title, headlines and placed wherever reasonably possible throughout the text of the page. Be careful about overusing keywords in the text though. This practice can be considered ‘keyword stuffing’ which is frowned upon by most search engines. The search engines can then devalue or remove the page from their index, so use keyword phrases appropriately within the page text.
There are many processes for selecting appropriate keywords. Google offers a tool that will read an already constructed page and offer ideas of what keywords might be appropriate for it. (This tool is part of the Google Adwords tool suite.) This tool is useful when one is unsure where to start in the keyword selection process. There are however, some things to avoid.
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.
Keyword identification is an ‘artform’ unto itself. Discovering or creating accurate and descriptive terms and phrases that many people search for, but for which not many big companies compete is a difficult chore. The Google Adwords tool is probably the best ally in this search.
It should be noted here that the traffic number provided by the Google Adwords tool is not an exact number. These should be used for comparison purposes only as they provide a comparative measure of the search activity that some terms receive.
One of the biggest allies you have in the selection process is creativity. Including things like geographic terms or city names in the keyword string help set your page apart from those of major corporations. Local customers in need of services generally include a geographic parameter within the search, such as ‘Banks in Birmingham.’ This is much more descriptive than simply searching for ‘banks.’ Big corporations generally compete very poorly on a local level for business traffic, so this could be an opportunity for a local business to elbow its way into the local market for providing goods and services.
Flexibility in working with keywords is also helpful over the long term. Some keywords may have to be abandoned if they fail to generate sales and traffic. As the study of consumer behavior is a bit of a guessing game, the web page operator may have to execute quite a few trial and error scenarios before getting one that attracts internet traffic. And for the start up or new business enterprise, searching for effective keywords may not take place quickly.
SEO Consultants in Denver brings years of experience in link building, keyword selection and website optimization to assist businesses compete for new or start up revenue. SEO Consultants Denver quickly achieve top page search engine rankings even for new or start up pages.
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