Article written for the 2004 Shareware Industry Conference discussing search keywords and how minor changes in keywords can effect search results, tips and techniques on increasing search ranking, and the cost-effectiveness of paying for keywords.
Choosing search terms can be tricky business. You have to find terms that are relative to your product or service, but aren't too popular and general that it becomes difficult to make your Website stand out from the crowd. Here are a few pointers.
Avoid single words: Single words run the risk of being vague about what the user is actually looking for. Example: If a user searches for "calendar", do you know if they want to buy a wall calendar or find calendar/scheduling software? Find a phrase that better describes what you are offering and use the keyword suggestion tools to find similar terms.
Should you go after the most popular terms? Yes and no.
Search for the term "software" at Google and you will see about 322 million results including some very large sites. You will better luck optimizing for a more specific term like "software game". With about 9 million results you have less competition for the term and therefore it will be easier to get your Website to the top search results.
According to the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, the term "software" has about 1.3 million searches a month compared to "software game" with about 250000 searches. While less people searched for "software game", the number of result pages is far less, allowing you to get better rank and more of that traffic. Your chances of getting a top 10 result for the term "software" are very slim but you have a much better chance targeting "software game".
This also applies to simple variants of terms. Look at the term "printer" with about 50 million results and the term "printers" with only 15 million. That is about 70% less results for the plural variation which means less competition and a better chance at getting good search results.
The result is you can target keyword phrases and plural and/or singular variations of certain keywords and get more traffic. A bonus side effect is because many of the engines treat plurals and singulars as the same term, as your rank increases for one it can also increase for the variant. The benefit is that you are getting better results for more terms and this leads to more traffic to your Website.
When optimizing your site it is best to pick 2 to 4 keyword phrases that you want to target and really focus on them. Focusing on too many terms makes it very difficult to improve your rank for any individual term. It is very important that the terms you target be in your <TITLE> tag, Meta Description and the plain text on the page. You should use the terms in regular language sentences instead of just padding them together with commas. It is vital that the terms be used 'in context' with the content of your site.
You will get added points for having the terms as link text to pages with relevant content to the link. Example: Link the words "calculator software" to a page that has lots of plain text about calculator software. It helps even more if the filename of the page is relevant as well. ('calculator-software.html' or '/software/calculator.html')
Also consider the order in which you place content on the page. Do you have the target terms in the title, at the top of the page in a <Hx> tag, in the content of the page several times?
There are several tools that can help you analyze a page for keyword density. Use these tools and tweak your page so that the target terms make up between 5% and 10% of the page.
Do not try to use doorway pages, hidden text, or cloaking to improve your results. The engines can detect this and will penalize or blacklist your Website altogether.
Don't place a lot of importance on Meta Keywords or joining link exchanges and similar cross-linking, systems. The engines do not give any extra rank for these and often ignore them entirely.
A key factor in getting good results at Google is PageRank® or 'PR'. The exact method for calculating PR is vague, but there are many theories out there. We do know that some of the factors are the number of sites linking to you, the relevance of content on those sites to the content on your site, the relevance of the text used to link to your site, the quantity of pages and content on your site, the lifespan or age of your site and it's content and even the sites you link to from your site.
A detailed discussion of PR is beyond the scope of this article, and so much has already been written that you are probably better served doing your own research.
If you are using Google AdWords, Google AdSense, Overture, Looksmart, or any other PPC based advertising you probably already have some sort of tracking mechanism in place to gauge its effectiveness and conversion to sales. It's critical that you look at more than the click through to decide which terms to keep and which to toss out. Look at the total spend for a term over a time period and compare that to the return. If you are targeting a product that has a trial period, take that into account when looking at your returns. You must look at the entire evaluation sales cycle to gauge the effectiveness of a PPC program. Also consider what value you place of Brand Awareness. Sometimes just having your company name seen in the search results is worth the cost.
J Cornelius is a software developer, Web developer, and Formula 1 fan in Atlanta GA. He has a strange affinity for odd numbers, european sports cars, thoughtful analogies, and is hopelessly addicted to chips & salsa. Read more
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