Choosing the right keywords/keyphrases

Choosing the right keywords, or actually, choosing the right keyphrases is one of the most important things about promoting your site in search engines. This is a delicate process and it's better to spend a good deal of time doing it, because search engines are a great way to generate traffic, provided that you can actually succeed in choosing the right keywords or keyphrases.

The first step is to sit down, think and make a list. What is my site really about? What are the keywords and keyphrases someone could use to find my site in a search engine? After you have chosen the keywords and keyphrases related to your site, write them down. Focus more on phrases, since most sites try to target words - there's a lot of competition in words, but less in phrases. A top listing in a phrase with medium usage is a far better way to generate traffic than a 200th listing in a word with heavy usage.

If your site has several pages, rather than making one list and using it in all pages, make a list for each page. Your pages shouldn't "compete" with each other, they should supplement each other. It's better to have 20 top listing pages in different search terms than 20 good listings in the same one. You can check your words and phrases by entering them in Goto's utility that shows how many times the particular word or phrase was searched in their engine during the last month.

Ok, now you have your list of keywords and keyphrases ready. The next step is to place them.

• Use the most important words in your <TITLE> tag. Don't clutter it up with them, but have at least a few in there. Make sure it still looks more like a description than a word list. Using lower-case seems to have a slight advantage over using UPPER-CASE, because most searches are done using lower-case.
• Use the most important words/phrases in your META description tag. The same rules apply as with the <TITLE> tag, however, the META description tag can be somewhat longer (check out the Meta tags section of this site).
• Use all of your words and phrases in your META keywords tag, but keep the total size around 200 characters. You're probably going to have to ditch some of the less important words. Make sure you don't repeat any word over 4 times. Don't use words that do not appear in your actual text.
• Use the most important words and/or phrases in your heading tag (it's the <H1> thing). Same rules apply as with the <TITLE> tag.
• Use all of the words and phrases you have chosen in your body text. Using them a few times in the top part of the page is important, since most search engines place more weight to words found on the top of the page compared to words found on the bottom of the page. Remember to make your writing seem natural when placing keywords, don't just make one big list of important words.
• Having a link or two containing your keyword in the link text might also help your ranking. If possible, point the link at a popular and well known page that is relevant to your keyword.