One of the things I found most difficult when I was first setting up my website, and then again later as I began to market it, was determining which were the best keywords to use. The problem was that I had too many choices --web tools,software, free ecommerce scripts,website promotion, blog, weblog and 150 software products each with a different name. What to do?
I found Mark Horrell's Keyword Density Analyzer very helpful. It told me the words, and frequency of each word, that the search engine robots will see when it visits my website. With this information, I was able to pick keywords which were already optimized on my page.
The issue then becomes, are these the right keywords? Are they the words that really best describes your site? Do they relay what your site is really about? ( relevancy is a must for Goggle!). Do they tell the story about the products you are selling? Will they target the right customers? Or maybe, you have a site like mine, which is in a very competitive market for each keyword. For example, Google returns, 594,000,000 possible pages for a search done on the word, software-- Oh My- How would anyone find my site in that crowd!.
Websites most easily found by search engines are niche sites where there fewer choices. However, it is hard to be niche site when one is selling popular products! Or is it? Try using keyword in your meta tags and on you website which are more exact-- for example, if you are selling advertising, try Illinois Website Advertising. Be creative!I found help to expand my keyword list, niche it, at wordtracker.com and goodkeywords.com and by using the Overture and Google Keyword Tools.
Frequency of keyword placement on a website is important. Too many times and the search engines will think you are spamming it. For example,.if you use a keyword more than 5 times in the keyword meta tags. But it must appear at least four times on a page to be pick up as an important keyword by the search engines. Placing keyword as names of links and as headlines between
is important too. If this takes up too much space or is too large use to reduce the size inside th tags. See for more marketing tips.
Geraldine Jensen is the owner of several ecommerce websites. She is the publisher and editor of http://www.familiesonlinemagazine.com, which was chosen as Hotsite by USA Today in October 2004 due to it diverse opinions and good content. She was Webmaster for a nonprofit organization for 10 years. Her newest project is Today's Family Forum.
