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Keywords
Location
Most people visit a search engine when they are looking for a product
or service of some sort and conduct a search on a rather broad topic.
Someone looking to buy a house in their own town might type the
keywords, "real estate" into the search engine. When they
are returned a list of Web sites starting in Alaska showing all
the real estate in the world, over 300,000 sites from Alaska to
Wyoming, they quickly see the value of narrowing their query. The
next search they conduct will be something like, "Virginia
Real Estate." This will give them something more manageable.
What this should tell any Web marketer promoting any product of
regional significance is to "regionalize" their site description
and keywords where appropriate.
Keep the important words chained together in sentences on
the page. If the user searches on
"KEYWORD1" AND "KEYWORD2" then you only have
to have the words in the same proximity on the page. If, however,
they search on "KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2" along with the surrounding
quotes, then the words MUST be together on your page, preferably
multiple times to find a match.
Optimizing your page for phrase searches can do wonders
in helping people find you! It's often difficult to rank well for
popular keywords. However, few sites make serious efforts to optimize
for common phrases leaving you with great opportunities to increase
your traffic!
In order to take the right steps towards a better position on the
search engines, you must first identify exactly what your website
is offering. Once you have a good idea of what that is, you need
to cut down your idea to just a few words, literally. A search engine
doesn't use a full-page public relations newsletter to index sites--it
uses words and short phrases. If you are not sure about what words
or phrases best describe your site, look at it from the user's perspective.
How would they find your site? What search words or phrases make
sense? The importance of these choices cannot be emphasized enough.
The keywords that you choose will dictate the life or death of your
website. When you choose your keywords, you need to be able to compete
with them. It is unrealistic to think that a young and small company's
website could rank number one on keywords like "Software",
"Books", or "Sex". Larger, more established
companies who have been on the Internet for several years are not
only much more well known, but also have links to them from many
other websites. These links give credit to the larger companies
and allow them to compete on such general words--engines see these
sites as a reliable source. That credibility is established over
a long period of time through affiliate programs, alliances, link
partnerships, and other similar program
BAD SPELLING CAN BE GOOD: Search engines don't have spell
checkers. Also, product names can have slight variations. For example,
MicroLogic has a product called Info Select. However, people could
easily search on MicroLogic, Micro Logic, Infoselect, or Info Select.
Look for obvious mistakes people are likely to make and then incorporate
some of them into one of your pages in some way to pick up traffic
you'd otherwise miss.
TITLE: Include and repeat keywords that people might search
for to find you in the TITLE of all your pages. This is very important.
Keep common word groups or phrases that people might search on together
if you can. The TITLE is EXTREMELY important to achieving good rankings.
PROMINENCE: Keywords that are more prominent will be weighted
much higher with the search engines. Most engines rank you higher
if the keyword or phrase is near the beginning of the title and
as close to the beginning of the page as possible.
META TAGS:
META tags tell search engines what keywords or categories you would
like to be listed under. A couple of engines factor this in to their
indexing algorithm. However, generally it will not make a significant
difference in how you are positioned. It doesn't hurt to try though,
especially since any of the engines can change the rules tomorrow
and it could catapult you to the top of the list (assuming you took
the time to add the META tags).
CASE-SENSITIVITY: If the user types the word Baseball then
most engines will search for "Baseball" with an uppercase
"B" ONLY. If your page has only "baseball" in
it, you'll not be found! On the other hand, if they search for "baseball"
and your page has "Baseball" on it, most engines default
to finding words of any case when the keyword used was in all lower
case. Therefore, it pays to make sure you have at least some of
the keywords in uppercase or starting with an uppercase letter if
the user might search that way. The easiest place to do this is
in the title of the page, in meta tags, and at the beginning of
sentences.
But, as I stated above, choosing good keywords is the most important
step in boosting your search engine position, so I strongly advise
you to take look at choosing a good
keywords page on this website!
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