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Keywords—Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search
Engines
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This week we will discuss the key to improving your sites
listing in the top Internet search engines.

When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’
into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions
of pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancy
score.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. If
your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher,
the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your
first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are
most relevant for each of your sites.

There are three ways to figure out your keywords:

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Ask your competitors
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This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important
keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is
good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites
like yours. Open the top site, and once the home page has
downloaded, click on ‘View’ in your browser, and then
‘Source.’ That will reveal all the HTML used to build the
Web page, including all the keywords that have been
specially inserted.

For example, let’s say one of your websites sold nutritional
supplements. You could carry out a search for ‘vitamins’ in
Google. The top site there is called DrugEmporium.com, and
the keywords they list are "The Katz group, Snyders, Drug
Emporium, Drug, Drug Store, pharmacy, stores."

Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site.
Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lots
of other keywords that aren’t obviously listed—like
‘vitamins’ for example. But you can repeat the process on
other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty
long list.

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Ask the pay-per-clicks
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Pay-per-click sites actually let you see how popular a
keyword is. They’re not being kind; they’re trying to make
money. The more webmasters bid on those keywords, the higher
the bids are going to rise—and the more money the
pay-per-clicks are going to make. FindWhat, for example, has
a Keyword Center, and Overture a Keyword Suggestion Tool.
Both are very handy, but they also require you to open an
account. That can cost a few bucks, but when you have a lot
of sites covering a lot of different areas, it’s usually
worth the expense.

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Use a specialized tool
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Not too surprisingly, a number of companies have popped up
to supply specific keyword services for a fee. The best of
these is WordTracker.com. They’re not bargain basement, but
you get what you pay for. They’ll give you all the keywords
you need and in my experience, they’re a sound investment.

Googlefight.com is another useful tool to see whether one
keyword is more popular than another. The site compares two
keywords and tells you which is more popular. It’s free and
has a limited use, but it’s fun to play with.

As you make up your list of keywords, bear in mind that it’s
also worth looking at key phrases. It’s quite possible that
a user looking to buy flowers online might search for ‘red
roses’ or ‘cheap bouquets’ as well as just ‘flowers.’ Key
phrases are often overlooked by competitors, so you’ve got a
pretty good chance of getting a high placement with the
right combination.

Don’t worry too much about the competition though. Some
people will tell you that you’re better off trying to find
keywords that no one else has thought of—as if there were
any!—and others will tell you to throw in keywords that are
only slightly relevant to your businesses.

In my experience, that’s a waste of time. If your
competitors are using certain keywords, it’s because they
know they work. And if you pick up any users using
irrelevant keywords, you’re not going to sell them anything.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here: just try to figure out
the most popular keywords and the best key phrases to put on
your site.

Whichever of these methods you use—and I tend to use more
than one—you should end up with a pretty comprehensive list
of keywords that you can stick into your website. The next
question then, is how do you use them? When a search engine
assigns relevancy to a site, it looks for the keywords in a
number of specific areas.

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Title Tag
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The title tag is written in the <HEAD> section of the Web
page and after the <TITLE> tags. It’s usually the line
listed in the search results as well. For example, the New
York Times’ title tag is “The New York Times on the Web:
Daily international, national and local news coverage from
the newspaper, breaking news updates, technology news,
sports, reviews, crosswords, classified ad listings.”

That looks long, but the title tag is usually between 50 and
80 characters including spaces. Different search engines
have different limits so you want to make sure that your
most important words are near the beginning of the title.
When you look at the New York Times’ site, you only see “The
New York Times on the Web”.

The rest of the title is made up of keywords and phrases but
in fact, you don’t want to put in too many keywords here.
Just place one keyword as the second or third word in the
title. Too many, and your site could be seen as spamming.

You can also list more keywords in the <META Keywords> and
<META description> sections of the <HEAD> area, but because
these areas have been so abused in the past, a number of
search engines today will skip right past the title tag and
go straight to the Web copy.

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Web Copy for SEO
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The search engines will scan the text on a Web page to see
if your site is relevant to the search term. That means that
in effect, your Web copy is going to have to do two things:
to persuade a customer to buy, and persuade a search engine
it’s relevant.

When you write your copy aim for about 500 words a page, but
throw in between four and eight keywords. You’ll have to try
to balance a smooth text flow with getting in all the
keywords you need to be listed.

You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-to
articles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in some
keywords and they can turn up in search engines and create
opportunities for link exchanges.

So there’s a few ways you can try to improve the position of
your site in a search engine. More important than where you
put the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That’s not
really a huge challenge as your competitors are likely to
have done the job for you.

Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn’t
mean you’re going to shoot straight to the top of Google.
One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you’ve been
online, so success on the search engines won’t come
overnight. The sooner you start submitting though, the
sooner you can start to rise.


Warmly,
Jeffrey Meier