Chapter 4 –
How to Determine the Keyword Selection for Your Site

Making a website attractive to search engines is a key factor for its success. One of the key ways in which to rank well with search engines is by optimizing the visible keywords on the pages. But in order to be successful in your keyword strategy campaign, you should use the following two steps.

You will need to determine what your pages are offering and also determine which words that your potential visitors might use in order to search for the pages of your site. You then need to create keywords which are based on those words.

For the full optimization of keywords on your site you should use between 3 to 5 keywords on the appropriate pages. It is vital that you start using them from the top left and then down. Many times you will find that this will be the first 200 words on each page of your site which will include the title tag, headings, abstract etc.

So the closer to the top left of your page the keywords are placed then the more weight they will be given by Google. Often, visitors will view your site in the same way that the search engine spider’s do, so emphasizing your keywords from the top left and down is a good way to design a site.

However, if your pages are already built, you may be thinking it is too late to select your keywords. But it’s not. It does not matter if you choose your keywords before or after the site has gone live (although it is better to do it before, as then you will not need to rewrite the text on the pages). But if it is live, then you may have the keywords, but they may not be the right ones. Yet they could be and you have not fully utilized their optimization value. So, if you wish, by using a thorough keyword selection process, you can make sure that they keywords you are using are optimized to their fullest extent.

Also, another issue where keyword selection is concerned is you need to determine whether the keyword is too popular or competitive. So if you find sites that are already competing for high rankings using particular keywords, then you may need to select more specific keywords instead. This can also be said for keywords which have several different meanings as well. Therefore it is important that you look how users will search for your pages, and which specific questions the content of your pages actually answers. So whenever possible, refine the keywords that you use in order to answer these questions. But whenever you are refining your keywords, it is important that you keep in mind that a large portion of searches carried out on the net contain three words or more. So when people are searching for answers on the internet, they will often phrase their search term as a question. Therefore many people will not use search words that describe the solution to a question. So in order to optimize your pages to their full extent, it is best if you think like the person who is searching.

This is a great way of getting ideas, and you do this by carrying out a search using keywords that you already know, and that you would like to target. Then click through the top sites that come up as a result of this search. Then once on the site, view their source HTML code and view the keywords that they have in their Meta tags. But it is important that you remember to use those keywords which relate to your site or page. It is easy to view a sites HTML code, all you do is click on the “View” button at the top of your web browser page and then select “Source” or “Page Source”.

By developing a list of keyword phrases, you should be able to optimize each page of your site for the search engines.