Selection of Keywords for Optimum Search Placement
|
Selecting your page's or site's keywords is critical.
|
Select your keywords with extreme care.
Determine the two or three dozen keywords that seem to be the most
important to your site, then ensure that the most important of these
are in your
TITLE,
META tags,
and are mentioned early on your web page.
Examine your competitors, or similar sites on the web.
What keywords did they use?
Where do they show up in a query using these keywords?
Select Some Uncommon Keywords
The WDVL is about HTML, CGI, Java, and a few other things..
and so are millions (literally!) of other pages.
The more frequently words are found in web pages catalogued by most
search engines, the more difficult it is to find any particular page
containing those frequently - used words.
For example, "HTML forms and CGI" will appear in millions of web pages.
Your page could appear as number 51,939 on the search result list of
93,000 web pages that all four of these words appear in.
Most search engines will not give us credit for being more, or better,
about HTML, CGI, Java, etc than the others.
Yes,
you have to state these things that your pages are definitely about,
but you have also to find keywords that set you apart from others.
Select Keyword Phrases
You rarely want to target a single keyword since with the billions of
words indexed on the Web now, generally one word simply won't cut it.
People learn quickly that if they type in "real estate" or "properties"
that they get listings for real estate from all over the world!
Not many people are likely to seek exactly
webmaster's encyclopedia
(that returns WDVL as first result in
Lycos)
but keyword phrases such as those,
serve to bring WDVL nearer to the top for people
that seek intelligently.
Each page in your web site will have different keyword phrases that
reflect the page's content. For example, if you have a page about
the history of astronomy, then "astronomy history" might be your
keyword phrase for that page. Your keyword phrase should always be at
least two or more words long.
Pair the generic keyword with something more specific.
Pair them with one or two other words.
Statistically, most people search for two to three
word phrases to avoid getting back too many unrelated matches.
Keep this in mind when you design your pages.
Don't worry about there not being enough top 10 slots where
you can achieve a high ranking. True, there are some keywords
that are very competitive. And if you find that no matter
what you do, you can't get in that top 10 spot for that word
or phrase, just be creative! There are so many other
keyword combinations where you can achieve a Top 10 ranking!
Think like your customer or clientele
- and it's really pretty easy to find a keyword combination
that you can dominate in the search engines.
You'll often find that there are more people searching for these other
phrases than were searching for the first phrase you thought of.
In marketing, this is called carving out your niche.
Don't Spam with Keywords
Do not repeat your keywords too many times, it can work against you.
Most of the search engines will penalize you if they catch you doing
something like listing the same word 500 times in a row at the bottom
of your page. Some will drop you entirely.
In the past pages rose to the top if they included lots
of words repeated.
This trick of data manipulation no longer works in most search engines.
For example,
InfoSeek
warns that using a keyword more than seven times in a META
description will cause the description to be ignored.
Pages with repeated words are now penalized and will no longer
appear prominently on a results of search listing.
Keywords you consider important may not be
exactly what users entered. Select User-Oriented Keywords
Will a novice search on anti-aliasing, Macromedia or Active-X?
In all probability they will search on web pages, web sites,
home pages with a possible combination of help, how-to, tutorial.
Therefore these and other similar words need to be included in the
introduction paragraph, and META-tags along with the more technical
topics.
Use a thesaurus or brainstorm with yourself and others and come up
with these keywords and synonyms, and rank them, most important first.
It is important - spend a lot of time on it.
How, for example, do we can make
The WDVL
appear high on lists if keywords such as "web development" are
entered?
People might find us by entering more words,
such as "web development and software technology"
or even
"webmaster's encyclopedia of web development and software technology."
Adding just one or two supplementary words can dramatically make a
site more relevant,
and it can be hard to anticipate what these words will be.
|
