Selecting Effective Keywords

Search engines can drive large amounts of potential customers to your website if you provide them with carefully chosen keywords.
If your keywords are too general or overused, the chances of
potential customers finding your site or making any real profit
from the visitors that do reach your site deminishes dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You may think you already know the right words for your search phrases, but you need to remember that you are on the inside looking out. That is you may not be able to be objective in your word selection. You need to think like your customer and not like a business owner.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. Try to gather as many words and phrases from them as possible. You may find that your
customers ideas of your business to be quite different from yours,
and they may bring words and phrases to you that you may not have even thought of.

After gathering words and phrases from outside sources, then you can add your own to that list. Then you are ready to evaluate your list.

The idea of evaluating your list is to narrow it down to a reasonable number of words and phrases that will bring the highest number of qualified, or targeted prospects to your site. These are the prospects that are more likely to purchase your product, rather than look around your site and then leave without making a purchase. When evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, there are three major elements involved: popularity,specificity and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

There is software that rates the popularity of keywords and phrases and some will even offer variations of your words. This software is very helpful in researching keywords and phrases, but don't make the mistake of realing solely on the results of this type of software. The more popular a keyword is, the greater search engine position you will need to obtain. This is due primarily to the fact that because
the word or phrase is very popular, you have more compitition and your listing may well be way down the list when searched. If you are on the tenth page of search listing, few, if any potential customers will even find you.


Keyword popularity alone is not enough to determine if your selection is satisfactory, you need to find the spacificity of those
words and phrases you have chosen. The more spacific your
keyword is, the greater chance that the prospect who is ready
to purchase from you will find you.

For example, let's say you have the popularity rankings for let's
say, "camping equipment". But the thing is, your company
specializes in selling tents only. The keyword tents may have a
lower popularity ranking than camping equipment, but it would
serve your purpose much better, because instead of getting a
large amount of people searching for everything from cookstoves
to fishing gear, you would be recieving search results from people
actually searching for tents, and your less popular keyword actually gets you better results. Plus, the more specific your keyword is, the less competition you will have.

The thrid factor you need to consider is consumer motivation. What makes a person type in a particular keyword or phrase? What is their motivation behind it? Again, you need to step into the prospects shoes to find out these things.

Let's say that a particular consumer is searching for a specialized
heavy duty tool that they need to use in their business. They know
that because the tool is used for special uses, they can't just find
one at the closest discount store, and even if they could, it would not
be of the quality they need to perform the task at hand. So they are
searching for a company that specializes in providing this special
heavy duty tool. And that is exactly what you want, you want to find
people who are ready to act and make purchases from your site.

This takes some toying around with your keywords to find the most
specific and targeted phrases to bring you the most motivated traffic to your site.

Continually evaluate your keyword selection across several search engines. Remember that things change constantly, watch for trend changes and such. You can not rely on log traffic analysis by itself to tell you if your selection is getting  you the results you need. Your log traffic analysis will not tell you how many of your site visitors actually made a purchase.

There has been some very helpful software recently that can help you determine the effeciveness of your keywords in individual search engines, and tools of this type can be of muchhelp in your search for the right words and phrases.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This should be the underlaying factor in evaluating the effectiveness of your keyword and phrases, and the factor you use in replacing inefficient or ineffective keywords with those that will bring you better profits.

It is a lot of work to continually monitor the effectiveness of your
keywords, but by doing so, you will achieve success in your keyword campain and ultimately in your business.