No matter what stage you are at right now with your current website I have no doubt that you want to get more traffic from the search engines.
If this is your first website you may have the mistaken belief that once you submitted it to a few or 1,000’s of search engines that visitors would show up in droves.
You chose your keywords, put them in your keyword meta tags, but can’t figure out why after several months, you’re not even in the Top 30 on any major search engine.
SEO is not easy for some people to understand. I have worked with quite a few people and it doesn’t matter how you explain it they never get it.
Some people never even get past the basics of understanding the importance of choosing the right keywords.
I realize that some aspects of SEO can get quite technical and mathematical, but it’s not necessary that you understand everything, but it is necessary that you do something.
That means just do it and perhaps the things you don’t understand now will become clearer later.
The right keyword or phrase to some people is the one they think someone would use in a search query, but that’s usually not the same as the one most people actually use.
Let’s say I have a new product and I have given it the name “Swopper Pages.” I design a web page for my swopper pages and set about becoming No.1 in Google for the keyword phrase “swopper pages.”
How difficult do you think that would be?
Let’s say when someone types swopper pages into Google to do a search my webpage comes up as No 1. How many people use a major search engine like Google every day or month to do a search using the term swopper pages?
It’s relatively easy to be No.1 in a major search engine for keywords that no one uses to search for because they have very little competition from other web pages.
If no one uses your chosen keyword phrase in a search query on a search engine it does not matter if you are No 1 for that term, you will get virtually no traffic from that keyword phrase.
If you fail to understand about choosing the right keywords, then almost everything else you could do with regard to SEO for your website will be a complete waste of time.
So let’s start with the most important aspect of SEO and that’s choosing the right keywords. But first what are keywords?
Keywords are the KEY to your success or not, with the search engines, because for the most part, search engines only understand words, the words, and text that appear on a web page.
Keywords or more precisely a keyword phrase (2 or more keywords in a phrase) are used in particular ways on a web page so that they tell the search engine what your web page is about.
Let’s say your webpage is about fishing and you choose keywords to put on the web page that you think is sure to tell the search engine your page is about fishing. After all its plain to you that your web page is about fishing.
But what you don’t realize is that the search engine has its own way of reading a web page and it decides your page is not about fishing but about boats.
Not only that but the search engine already has 1 million other web pages about boats, so exactly what priority is it going to give your web page in its catalogue?
So not only have you not designed your web page so that the search engine clearly understands your page is about fishing, but you have also ended up competing against web pages for boating.
Your “boating” page has far too much competition with over 1 million other pages, is lost in a crowd, and will never be found when someone searches for the term fishing.
Part of what makes your web site easier for the search engines to find, for words you want to be found for, is using the right keywords.
The words on your web pages are to a search engine like a single drop of water in a vast ocean.
So if your website is that drop of water to a search engine, just how do you ever get noticed or found in the ocean.
The answer is in making your self easier to find and stand out from all the other drops and waves in the ocean.
Standing out from the crowd often means not competing in a crowd and using keywords in such a way that your web page shouts at the search engine (but not too loudly) telling it clearly what your web page is about.
If you understand that an electronic calculator is a number cruncher, a search engine is an electronic word cruncher of mammoth proportions.
It’s the ultimate word processor whose main task is to sort, index, and catalog billions of web pages and trillions of words.
Here’s an example of how important choosing the right keywords are to your success with the search engines.
Recently a webmaster asked me to look at the keywords someone had chosen for a series of web pages.
The keywords and keyword phrases that were chosen for different web pages were:
“hypnosis,”
“weight loss hypnosis” and
“stop smoking hypnosis.”
While these keywords and phrases are searched for frequently by people using the search engines, they are also keywords and phrases used by over half a million to one million other websites.
This means they are keywords with a lot of competition.
The result was that after more than 6 months in existence this website was not in the top rankings for any of these keywords with any of the major search engines.
When I say the top rankings I mean in the Top 30 search results.
In fact, the website in question was not even in the Top 500 on any of the major search engines of Google, Yahoo, or MSN for any of these keyword phrases.
What made this situation worse is that the person who researched the keywords used for this web site was being paid to do this SEO.
This is what you should know about choosing keywords
- It’s VERY IMPORTANT to choose keyword phrases that are used by people actually doing searches on the search engines
- It’s VERY IMPORTANT to choose keyword phrases that have enough people using them to query the search engines. This is so that you can get traffic if you get a high enough ranking in the search results for that term.
- It’s VERY IMPORTANT you choose keyword phrases that don’t have too much competition, especially when your web site is new or has a low ranking on the web.
OK now for some ACTION:
- Write down all the keywords and keyword phrases you have currently chosen for just the index page (main landing page for your domain) of your web site, or if you have more than one web site, choose one.
- Now ask yourself, HOW you chose YOUR KEYWORD PHRASES and more importantly WHY?
If HOW you chose your keyword phrases were WITHOUT doing any proper Keyword Discovery and WHY you chose them was because that’s what you think your web page is about, then you are more than likely doomed to fail with the search engines.