Keywords – friend or foe?

Love em or hate em, you will get sick of hearing the term “keyword” or “keyword phases”.

You really need to understand what keywords are and how to make them work for you, since they are the golden thread intrinsically linking your customers to you. Your customers are your ‘bread and butter’ and therefore it is important that you have a very thick and strong thread, after all you don’t want to loose your life line – you customer.

So then how do keywords work – how do they tie you to your customer?

I’ll ask you another question in order to answer that question. How do your customers find you online, what is their primary way of locating you – finding your business?

Well if you had an off-line business the primary method would have traditionally been via the yellow pages – right? But still, even then they would need to have a method of cutting down their search since those books started to get rather large, so they would restrict their search by business type, dentist, hair dressing, etc.

Well keywords are not that different, though this allows your customer to be even more specific. They would search perhaps on hairdressers specializing in perms or braiding, etc. Can you imagine if all online sites where placed in to a set of yellow pages – whoa, it would start to look like the national library – too overwhelming for anyone to search through!

The main method used today by folks to find a specific business is via their favorite search engine like Google or Yahoo.

When they search they can use a variety of search terms or ‘keywords’ in order to locate specifically what they want. As you already are aware, if you don’t specify your search correctly you end up with literally tens of thousands of websites that have little relevance to what you are after.

So people have become rather adept at searching for what they want by entering a precise set of keywords or key phrases that limit their search to get only very relevant results returned by the search engines.

Knowing this, the search engine owners based their entire technology around the use of keywords and keyword phases, not wanting to loose their customers by returning only what they have requested.

Now are you starting to see the importance of keywords?

That is why I keep banging on about being very niche, because people and search engines love very strictly relevant material. The other benefit of course is you will only get people clicking on your site link that really want your material which means your pay per click expenditure will be kept lower with a higher ratio of converting visiting customer to buyers.

You only want people to find you that need you, else you will pay for browsers to visit your site with no intention of buying or little interest in your site – probably brassing them off that you have misrepresented your site and wasted their time.

Since search engines love keyword rich sites, your chances of progressing up the organic listings within a search engine is severely reduced if you do not use keywords appropriately.

You need to think about what people would be searching on in order to find a small set of highly relevant keywords and keyword phrases.

For example if you had an online business around farm milking equipment, do you think one of your keywords would be “farming”?

Err – wrong!

Farming is too generic, be very specific “farm milking equipment”, “dairy farm milking equipment”, “equipment for milking cows”, “equipment for cow milking extraction”, etc, would be more appropriate wouldn’t it?

These are called ‘long-tail’ keyword phrase search terms, and now more than ever they have become necessary in order to ensure a good match of customer to website.

You could also attempt to find some very relevant ’short-tail’ keywords that might also be appropriate, for example “milking equipment”, “milk extraction” (that one might get lactating mums looking for a breast pump), etc – so you can now see how important it is to get this absolutely right.

It might be impossible to ship your product internationally, and you find there is a great deal of competition internationally for your type of product or service so perhaps including a geographical location in your keyword phase may assist your PPC efforts. For example “North American farm milking equipment” or “Kansas farm milking equipment” might be appropriate.

Step 1

Compile a huge list of keywords and keyword phases that you believe best represent your business or service 20-30 would be good for this exercise.

If you can’t think of that many it doesn’t matter but really rack your brain over this as it will also help you to understand your target market much better. Don’t cheat by shortcutting this process, as the next step will become less effective – so take your time in doing this first part. No more than a couple of days though.

Step 2

This is where we find out which keywords and keyword phrases are more frequently searched on, which will be more profitable, and which ones just are not worth keeping.

There are a few tools you can purchase to help you achieve this goal or for this initial phase you can use some free tools developed by the search engines to perform the task satisfactorily for now.

Note: You do get some tools in the Wahoo package (the second level, middle package) to help with this.

Also try the following URL’s as a start:

http://www.nichebotclassic.com/

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

I also recommend getting a $5.00 account with Google adwords, this will be of great benefit. Go to the main Google page, click on the “Advertising Programs” link and select Google Adwords.

I highly recommend getting an account with the following URL – the service is very good and there is a clear competitive analysis given to you. You can just get a 7 day account to perform this task. It’s well worth the money and effort given that this will form the foundation of your on-line business:

http://www.wordtracker.com/

I just want you to know that these are not affiliate links, I’m not making anything from promoting these links, just giving you some direction based on my own experience!

Step 3

One tool I have recently be introduced to is a free Microsoft product (MSN Ad Lab) that helps you analyze the commercial value of a keyword or key phrase. A rating of 0.97 is equivalent to a 97% possibility that people searching on this keyword or phrase are willing and ready to open their wallets – so check this out PRONTO.

Simply enter your keyword or keyword phase into the field provided, ensure the “Query” option is selected and submit.

Do this for each of your keywords or keyword phases, try some new combinations if more come to mind and record the value returned for each. IMPORTANT – do not remove any, regardless of the returned value just yet.

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/OCI.aspx

Step 4

Once you have compiled all of the data, the current competition, number of searches, likely ‘commercial intention’, you decide which of these keywords or keyword phrases you want to keep.

You must keep in mind that you may have different variations of keywords and phrases for each page. For example the main page, your landing and/or squeeze page may have direct sales copy that primarily uses of a couple of your key words. Subsequent pages may contain related, but different key word sets.

For example, say your site is about fishing. The first page is focused on the generic topic covered off in your site, fishing gear, fishing boats, best types of fish, etc. You may have a page just dedicated to fishing rods, maybe breaking out your three favored types of rod – mentioning them by brand name. Another page is about fishing tackle, types of tackle, best knots to use, sinkers, hook types, etc. See what I mean?

Each page will contain its own set of keywords or key word phases, because you talk specifically about these keywords.

Just imagine a person searches on “best hooks for catching bass”, and end up on your landing page instead of your tackle page, etc.

Step 5

Sort out how you will employ these keywords into your headers and content on each site page. This is what you want to do so the search engines make a decision when a search term is used. They look at your web page on fishing tackle and say – ‘hey, this page has an H1 title of Fishing Tackle, but an H2 Title on Fishing Hooks and specifically mentions in their write up about “the best hooks to use when catching bass is…”.

This is the logic the search engines use and therefore should be exactly what you use when designing your site.

Step 6

Identify your best keyword or keyword phase – the one with the least or very bad competition, one that you can dominate the market with. This one should be included everywhere, on as many pages as possible, in your H1Header tags, your domain name – everywhere. Any e-books you write should contain this word or phrase – be the KING of that keyword so you will rank number 1 in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

Where possible use this keyword or phrase in naming photos, but maintaining what the image is about. I.e. if you have a video or photo of someone pulling up a huge bass, and you have selected as you main keyword or phase is “lake fishing”, perhaps name the video or photo “bass lake fishing” or “pulling up bass while lake fishing”, etc.

Recap

I know this is rather long so I will recap a simplified version to help ingrain this in your mind:

1. Keywords or keyword phrases are how people will find your site, be very specific
2. Search Engines where built around keywords, you must do the same
3. Make each page, title, headings and content tie into one or more specific keywords or keyword phrase
4. Select one keyword or keyword phrase that you can dominate the market with and infuse into your site

Well – hopefully I haven’t bored you to death and you have learned something valuable?

I really appreciate you feed back on my explanations or style of writing, good or bad – because I want this information to be used by others, not just sit in cyber-space for the Google robots to read. Hey they don’t go bass fishing too often!

Anyway until next time:

Learn and do one piece at a time.

Doug Turner.

marketingwahoo.com