On of the most often asked questions to me about SEO is how do you choose what keywords to use when writing a page.
Stoney deGeyter has a great explanation of how you should choose keywords
If you have ever wondered how to determine the best words for optimizing your traffic, you should read it.
I’ve written about writing keywords before, but Stoney says it better than I ever did.
When first starting or adding to a website one of the first things that you want to do is to decide on which keywords to target. These words should be action words to get your visitors to do whatever it is that you want them to do when they land on one of your pages.
Usually a new client will ask me which keywords should I pick and how do I use them? I usually first explain that keywords can be and usually are more than one word. How it can be very hard to get to the top of a search results page for a one or two word keyword that is very competitive (like “web design”). It can be much easier to get to the top spot for a more narrow keyword (“web design Pittsburgh”, “web designer western PA” or “WordPress expert Pittsburgh”), but because the action inferred from that keyword is more specific to what you do, the traffic from a search term like that may also convert to sales better if you pick the right one.
Another great advantage in more targeted keywords is if you are buying keyword ads you can save quite a bit of money not getting clicks that aren’t really interested in what you have to offer.
It’s always best to have one unique page per keyword and to use your keyword once in the main headline, maybe once more in the sub-headline and a couple of times in the body text. It’s a good idea to read the page out loud before it’s published to see if it sounds spammy. If you have overused your keyword it may be considered spam by the search engines or worse by your human visitors.
To help my clients pick good keywords I have been sending them to a older post where I suggested some free keyword research tools (two of the three still work). I’m writing this post today because I found a new free keyword tool from WordStream and I thinks it works really well so I’m now recommending it to everyone.
I was reading an article from the Wall Street Journal on line the other day and it was about how you can find hidden deals on Ebay by searching for misspelled words. The idea being that if you searched for items that were listed, but misspelled that there would be fewer buyers looking for that item, so fewer bidders and a lower price.
While reading I thought that this could also be an effective strategy for site owners who are bidding for pay per click keywords on search engines. Here’s how:
The article on the WSJ also has links to sites to search for these misspellings if you are interested it trying this.
I have written before (and here) that I believe that if you have a site that is over optimized for search engines chances are that your human visitors could find it hard to read, use and understand.
I ask my customers what good is having all of the traffic in the world if they just stop by for a second and then click to go somewhere else? Search engines are now thinking like this. They can tell how long visitors are on your site and how many pages they are visiting and I think this is incorporated into their algorithms.
My advice is to read your content out loud. If there’s someone else there to hear it so much the better, but even if you are by yourself it still works. If your content sounds like it’s stuffed with keywords or sounds unnatural and forced it’s probably not good for your site.
For SEO there are rules for exactly how many keywords to use and where to put them, but this formula (besides being a search engine secret) is changing all of the time. That means to keep up the ranking that this has achieved your content may have to be changed often.
If you write in a natural sounding way it will be a better experience for your human visitor and that really is what the search engines want to provide for their customers (the searchers). That also means that your content can stay the same and not be affected as much or at all by the changing search engine algorithms.
There are some good points in an article by By Rusty Ford on the SEO-News site called “Key Wording Your Web Site With Natural Language” that may help you decide what is “Natural Language.”
There has always been a great debate about exactly how keywords should be used on your pages. Should I use them in my headlines and how many times should they be on a page? How many times does repeating your keyword on a page does it take before your page will be considered Spam?
When I’m writing a page I like to keep keywords in mind and sometimes have a list in front of me while I’m writing. Mostly though I write my page with my human visitor in mind and not the search engine spiders. After all getting people to my page is only half of the battle, you also have to provide them with something to attract and hold their interest.
Todays post is on the HighRanking site and is written by Karon Thackston. It’s called “What’s the Best Use of Keyphrases?” and it gives some interesting insights as to how the search engines “think” about this.
I like to tell my clients that to help your site attract more visitors and to improve your search engine rankings that you need to continuously add good new content. The big question then is just what makes good content?
I feel that most of it should be directly related to your site and what you are trying to promote. Most all of my posts are directly related to my main site theme which is website design and promotion. As time goes by I am trying to post in that category as opposed to the general Internet information one. I do allow myself the joy of also putting some fun stuff on my site in the category of my Friday Just For Fun Stuff. It’s a nice diversion, but I limit it to mostly just Fridays because it is just a diversion and I don’t want it to take away from the primary theme of my site.
Jason Lee Miller writes for WebProNews which is a site covering technology and business. He wrote an article called “20 Tips for Writing Good Copy” and he explains well what can be considered good content that will help you add content that is something that your visitors will read and enjoy, not just filler for between the keywords.
One of the best free ways to promote your website and business and to add good content to your site is to write articles and to promote them on the many free article distribution sites available to authors. My best advise here is to always best to stick to writing about what you know about and to keep to ideas that are relevant to your site. There is not really any use in bring visitors to your site that are not going to be interested in what you have to offer.
I have written several articles that I have on several distribution sites and I keep seeing them show up on sites across the world. For now at least most of the sites that are republishing my articles are not very high ranking, but I believe that having them link to my site helps my site grow in rank (even if it’s only a little bit). One day a major site may see fit to pick up one of my articles, but I think it is much more likely that there will come a time when one of these new sites will become very popular and high ranking, then my link will be much more valuable.
One of the sites I use to distribute my articles is ideamarketers.com and they are featuring a good article by Marnie Pehrson called “Article Promotion for Better Search Engine Placement”. She talks about how to target and use keywords in your articles.
Keywords in your copy are one of the most important ways to get visitors to your site from the search engines. Just getting the visitors to your site won’t do you any good if they leave right away because your copy was optimized for the search engines, but not your human visitors.
Karon Thackston has written a good article published on businessknowhow.com. She talks about how to use keywords in your text without making them sound mechanical, like they were stuffed into the content.
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