Up On Main Street

Keyword optimization, the art of choosing correct keywords for your pages, is one of the most important things related to search engine optimization.

Unfortunately, most people spend very little time on it. They decide on a few keywords quickly, optimize their pages for it, then publish to the Internet.

Most times then not, this results in very poor rankings in the search engine results page. That is if they are found at all.

Before optimizing your web pages for the search engines, you need to spend time figuring out exactly what keywords, or keyphrases,  you want to target.

Yes, engines are an excellent source of free traffic, but if you want to utilize them to their full potential, a little effort is required.

Ask Google

If you already have a website and not getting much traffic. One of the first places to start is to see how Google views your site.

One of easiest ways to find out what Google thinks your site is about is use the Google Keyword Tool and where it says “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” Click on “Website Content”.

Enter your URL (just your homepage first) and see what information comes back. Then you can go back and check for the whole site.

Another way is to use Google Webmaster Tools.

Don’t have an account? Sign up free for Google webmaster tools.

Submit your site map and let Google “crawl” the site. This may take a couple of days, but it will be well worth it.

Once they crawl your site, you can see a lot of information in your webmaster tools account.

On the “Dashboard” page, you will see a section for Keywords.

It will show you the 5 top keywords of what the search engine “thinks” your site is about. Click on the more link and you will be able to see more keywords in order of significance.

If the top 5 keywords are not what your site is about, you need to start at your home page and begin your web site optimization.

Website Optimization

Read your home page. After reading, answer these questions.

• What is the main theme of the page and of your website?
• Which words describe the contents accurately?
• What words or phrases would someone use if using a search engine to find this information?

Once you answered these questions, write down the words and phrases.

Don’t worry if the list becomes very long, you can always remove some later.

When I started keyword optimization for my website (createawebsitetutorial.com), I selected one main theme. Then used popular keywords or phrases for each of the sub-pages that was pertaining to the main theme.

I decided on the popular keyword phrases two ways.

1. Thought about what information was need to help people with site creation.

2. Looked at my competitors websites.

Create an individual and distinct list of keywords for each web page. The other popular words would also be used in the navigational menu.

Each of the popular keywords for your different web pages should cover different areas.

It is okay to have similarities between your lists, but should not be 100% identical.

With your list handy, go back to the google keyword tool and type in the most broadest theme for your site.

See what phrases come up for the main theme.

Are any of the keywords that came up on your list?

If you have a blog attached to your site, you may want to use some of the keywords in blog posts or drop them entirely.

If other words look like they are searched for quite a lot, it may be a good idea to consider adding them.

But remember, you need to…

Keep the search engine optimization process in mind!

By now, your list is probably pretty full of very competitive, single-word terms such as “diet” or “health” or “money” or whatever.  Take them off the list.

I don’t mean to sound sound harsh, but if you’re a beginner, you will have no chance of achieving page one or two under such terms.

There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of sites targeting them and even with excellent search engine optimization skills, are extremely tough to conquer.

Think about different variations of these popular keywords. If you were originally thinking about the keyword “diet”, look at using a long tail, about 4 – 5 keywords, like “quick weight loss tips”.

These terms may possible be easier to rank well under.

It is better to be in the top 10 for a search term with medium searches than to rank on the 15 – 20th page for a heavily searched term.

Select keyphrases that get searched, but that aren’t too competitive.

You can check to see if a keyword phrase is highly competitive by using Google search engine and type in the phrase with ” around the term.  example “quick weight loss tips”.  This will show you how many web pages are optimized for that phrase.

If it is only a couple hundred thousand, you may have a good chance at achieving top ranking.

Many webmaster also target common misspellings, if some of the keywords related to your site are often spelled wrong.

Be very careful doing this, as it is hard to efficiently target misspellings without damaging your site’s authority.

Would you buy anything from a person that can’t even spell properly?

Didn’t think so.. So, be careful with those misspellings.

At this point, you should have completed your keyword optimization process and now possess a pretty good list of medium-popularity keyword phrases for each of your pages.

I recommend you read basic on-page search engine optimization.  It shows where to place the keywords you selected in order to achieve results with the search engines.