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> Get Articles > Search Engines and SEO > Search Engine Success Tips : Research those Keywords before you target them
Search Engine Success Tips : Research those Keywords before you target them
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Vic Pandya
VicWebAhoy.com
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http://www.marketing-seek.com
Search Engine success tips : Research those Keywords before you
target them
By Vic Pandya
===============================================================
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the art and the science of
getting websites ranked higher on the search results has been
gaining ever-increasing awareness with the progress of the
Internet age. In the absence of any unified, authoritative
standards, it has also come to be alternatively recognized as
Search Engine Promotion / Placement /Positioning (SEP).
The differences in the moniker apart, some of the fundamental
techniques essential for obtaining higher search engine
rankings and traffic are pretty much universal and still it is
a fact that many a webmasters are not aware of these and thus,
fail to deploy them in their web promotion efforts.
One such fundamental SEO technique is keyword research,
selection and targeting.
Let us consider this hypothetical scenario: You are building a
website. Using a combination of your gut feeling and some
brainstorming you come up with a list of keywords and key
phrases for which you would like to get your site listed
high-up on the search engines. You put in those keywords in the
Title, meta tags and body text of various pages of your site.
For a minute, let us assume you do manage to get top 10 - 20
- 30 rankings for many of those keywords that you targeted.
Now, if none of the Internet users are actually using those
keywords in the queries they make on the search engines, how
much traffic do you think your site will get via the search
engines? The obvious answer is very little, if that.
Therefore, in order to derive traffic to your website via the
search engines, it is essential to find and target those
keywords, which are
a) Related to the theme of your website and
b) Actually being used by a sizeable number of search
engine users.
Armed with such keywords, you can be confident that if you
optimize your site to rank high on them, you will have not only
high rankings but also high traffic and that leads us to
another problem.
How to find such high-traffic keywords?
In the following section of this article I will reveal several
distinct online sources, all of them free and quick, where you
can conduct your keyword research with a fair amount of
effectiveness.
Keyword research source #1: Overture Search Term suggestion tool
================================================================
The pay-per-click search service Overture.com (nee GoTo.com)
has a free service that takes a keyword from you and shows you
1) A number (usually dozens) of keywords related to yours
on which their users have searched in the previous month and
2) The actual number of searches run on each of these
keywords during the previous month
Experimenting there with a few basic keywords for your website
should let you quickly build a list of high-traffic keywords
you will do well to target for your website.
The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is available here:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Keyword research source #2: WordTracker
=======================================
WordTracker is a commercial keyword finder service that finds
hundreds of keywords related to your website. It also receives
data from some meta search engines and attempts to project the
aggregate number of searches run on these keywords across the
Internet. You will also get a variety of other keyword research
and targeting related data using this service.
They have a feature restricted free service that still packs
good value for Do-It-Yourself type individual SEO projects.
Because of the depth of features and information it provides,
using this service usually involves a slight learning curve but
once you get used to it, you will probably find it worth your
effort.
You can find this service at http://www.wordtracker.com/
Keyword research source #3: Major Search Engines
================================================
As many Internet users might have noticed, when you run
searches on some of the major search engines, they display a
few related keywords along with the results. Some engines call
it 'Others searched for', some call it 'Related Searches' while
some others label this with different, but similar tags.
Regardless of what these are labeled as, you can be fairly sure
that all of these keywords would be attracting a significant
amount of traffic on the search engines. Here is a list of five
search engines that display such related keywords, along with
the identification of what they call it:
Engine What they call it
============ =====================
AltaVista.com Others searched for:
AllTheWeb.com Beta FAST Topics:
DirectHit.com Related Searches
HotBot.com PEOPLE WHO DID THIS SEARCH ALSO SEARCHED FOR
Yahoo.com Related Searches:
Go to any of these search engines, type in your basic keyword
and hit the Search button. On the results page, you will
usually find a list of related keywords from which you can pick
and choose the useful ones.
Summing up:
===========
Use the above keyword research sources in any combination to
suit your convenience and come up with a list of at least a few
dozen or more keywords to target and then steer your search
engine marketing campaign accordingly - the results, in all
probability, will come as a pleasant surprise.
Happy keyword hunting and high traffic to you.
Author:
Vic Pandya has been a western India based computer software
innovator - entrepreneur for over 15 years. Vic's software
related research papers and articles have been published
by such publishers as McGraw-Hill, Ziff-Davis and others.
He can be reached at mailto:VicWebAhoy.com.
Copyright 2002, Vic Pandya. All rights reserved.
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