HOW TO SELECT KEYWORD PHRASES FOR YOUR WEBSITE

(Originally written for Create-Income-Generating-Website)

Using carefully selected keyword phrases can mean the difference between your website not showing up or showing on a search results list.  Fortunately, there are several keyword selection tools available.  Some can be used for free, e.g. Trellian offers a free trial of their Keyword Discovery Tool and Google has a free Adwords Tool.   There are at least five important factors to consider will picking key words.  They are relevance, frequency, competition, interests of searchers, and repetition of words.

1.      Relevance to Website Topic – The best keyword phrases will be those that are very relevant to the material that you are presenting on your website.  The more specific the phase is to your website topic, the better.   General terms may be relevant but do nothing for focusing the traffic onto your site.   Keyword selection tools can give you some ideas and suggestions that you may not have thought off on your own but they can’t assess relevance to your website.  You must be the judge as to whether a phase is highly relevant or not.

2.      Frequency of Use in Searches – Keyword phrases that are used a lot by people searching the web relative to your website topic are highly desirable, if there aren’t too many other people using those phrases as keywords on their websites.  Keyword selection tools are very useful in determining the frequency of use of specific key words and phrases.  Keyword phrases that deal with topics of general interest, e.g. Fishing, will have higher frequency of use but greater advertiser competition than those dealing with a specific topic, e.g. fishing on Lake Erie.  If your website deals with the more specific topic, you may want to look for specific area keyword phrases with relatively high frequency of use.   The highest frequency of use phrases are not always the best.  After all, it does you little good to use high frequency of use terms that match those in searches, if the competition for those terms is so great that your website is never high enough on a search results listing to be visited. 

3.      Advertiser Competition for the Term – The amount of competition that you have for a term will partially determine the amount of traffic your website will get from people using that term in their searches.   Search engines use several factors including page rank to determine where your website page will fall on a search results listing.  If there are a lot of websites using a specific term as a keyword phrase and their pages are ranked higher than yours, you are not likely to show anywhere near the top of a search results listing.  Some webmasters have chosen to focus on a specific area or niche when designing their website in order to limit the competition.  If your website deals with a general topic and not a niche, you may want to consider picking phrases that aren’t used as frequently but have less competition.  Again, keyword selection tools are very useful in determining the competition for a specific key word or phrase.

4.      Interests of People doing the Searches – Not only does a keyword phrase need to be relevant, used a lot by people doing searches, and not have too much competition, but it needs to be specific or the traffic that it generates may be looking for something other than what they can find on your website.  A term like walkthrough for may be relevant if your site has procedures that walk you through some process, but it may not be a good choice for a keyword phrase.  There is a good reason that other advertisers aren’t using it that much.  People that end up at your website by using that general term in their search may be looking for something not related to the process covered by your website.

5.      Word Repetition – It is not a good idea to use too many keyword phrases for a website page that contain the same noun.  For example, if your site deals with tomatoes, you don’t want to pick too many phrases containing the word tomatoes such as growing tomatoes; planting tomatoes; tilling around tomatoes, etc.  You should select the best and limit the number to around three.  Otherwise, you may be considered by search engines as trying to manipulate the system to get a higher page rank.  In place of improving the chances of your website getting near the top of a search results list, it may actually reduce them.