August 3, 2007      (Updated from our Nov. 19, 2003 article)

When you visit them, many commercial websites could probably look successful and appear to be “winners”. Of course, only the site owner or its webmaster knows that for sure. Optimize a site for the wrong keywords or key phrases and you will end up with a site that ranks well, but chances are it will bring you some very unrelated traffic and you may even get enquiries for products or services that your company does not even offer!

More than ever, web sites and their pages fail in search engine rankings simply because of bad keyword selection or key phrase identification. Certain keyword identification may have been done in the past, but was either done incorrectly or some of the keywords used by the real searchers looking for your products or services could have changed over time. The latter is usually the case.

How to identify the right keyword combination for your site
In most cases I have seen over the past few years, the real problem comes from not using the right keyword and key phrase combinations, the very ones used by the large majority of the potential visitors and customers to any given commercial web site. If you were to make a search for a page on the major search engines with relative, specific keywords, the question is what keyword or key phrase combination would be best to use?

Today, most people do not think alike. What someone might type in the search box can vary a lot of what others would type, while looking for the same product or service. If you are really serious in the careful keyword and key phrase identification for your site, what you need is a specialized tool that will tell you exactly the specific keywords and key phrases real day-to-day searchers are using when shopping for the products and services they need.

You have to get a detailed list telling you the most frequently used keywords and search queries to really begin any effective and serious keyword and key phrase optimization on any given site.

Free keyword suggestion tools
Some webmasters have been using for quite a while one of the free keyword generator sites available. Some pay-per-click search engines, i.e. search portal companies that effectively sell text ads to various search engines, can in fact provide some suggestions or similar tools for some of their clients. One that I use is the Overture suggestion tool. It can give you a certain number of alternative keywords or key phrases to the search queries you may have entered into the search form.

However, the problem is that these suggestion tools are mostly used by some webmasters and a limited number of optimization professionals. Therefore, some results coming out can at times be misleading or misinterpreted, and generally do not give a true realistic picture of what really happens in the search engines.

If a person is looking for alternative keywords or search queries to optimize a particular web site, some of the above tools may offer some help. One could assume that, if some keyword or key phrase combinations haven't been thought of by most of these webmasters, some would be inclined in thinking that those particular queries are probably not worth considering for optimization in the first place.

Again, we need to investigate a bit more in the subject. Also, in the world of search engine optimization, one word of advice I would give is to never assume anything. Always remember that search engine optimization is a science as well as an art.

Over time, SEO experts have found that search engines are not in a position (nor is it their mandate) to supply you with an ordered list of search engine keywords and key phrases relevant to your particular topic. In certain cases, some of them might tell you what could be some of the most popular search queries this month or the month before. But, generally speaking, this kind of information can be rather misleading for most people and could have a drastic impact in the overall ROI of the site. Clearly, a better solution of properly identifying keywords needs to be used.

The Wordtracker professional search tool
If you are like most people, you might find that spending days searching through various databases can be very time consuming to say the least. Instead, optimization experts use much better tools such as Wordtracker. Today, Wordtracker is the most popular fee-based keyword and key phrase analyzer on the Internet and is used by most serious search engine optimization companies. What makes Wordtracker so special is that it is based on meta search queries actually made by ordinary people searching the web everyday, meaning the keyword and key phrase combinations found are much more reliable than the pay-per-click listings suggested by the Overture suggestion tool.

Over time, I have also found that the data generated from Wordtracker is also more objective. The people at Wordtracker know that you should not always rely on the most competitive keywords and search query combinations. These are more or less dictated by large corporations that can afford to allocate much bigger budgets on various search engine marketing and sales campaigns.

Instead, a much better and simpler alternative and one that costs much less is to optimize for less popular key phrases or search terms for your industry. You could try different combinations or variations of how a key phrase can be written in the search box. For example, if your site only offers residential real estate in the City of Detroit, you can have a major advantage optimizing your website for keywords such as “Detroit Residential Real Estate” or such similar terms.

Generally speaking, geo-physical location usually has a much stronger impact on many search queries, as it effectively narrows down a search to a specific city or location. If your site happens to be optimized around such similar geo-physical keywords, it will usually rank very high for these search terms. Another way to look at this situation would be to write several articles on a certain subject or theme that is very relevant on a given site and that targets a specific audience.

Have each article optimized for a certain keyword or key phrase. Just make certain they are truly unique articles so as not to use the same basic text, just simply exchanging a few keyword combinations here and there. Failure to do that could be termed as spamming and is certainly frowned upon by most of the major search engines.

Conclusion
It is my feeling that, over time, additional tools might be developed to help more people find the delicate balance between the actual number of competing web sites for each search engine and the exact popularity of certain keywords or key phrases. It can prove difficult at certain times to consistently come up with alternative keywords that may seldom be used by your competitors but that are used almost daily by the real searching public. Again, Wordtracker has an undisputed advantage in that specialized field.

The idea here is to use a combination of carefully selected keywords and key phrases and some basic trial and error sessions. After that, you need to analyze the results over and over until a satisfactory level of ROI and sales is achieved. It is a very time-consuming approach, but in the end, one that can make a big difference in the search engine results pages.

If your site brings in a fair amount of targeted visitors, has a high conversion rate and is constantly gaining in popularity over your competition, you will generally do very well. When trying to identify the right keywords and key phrases for a website, remember the name of the game is accuracy and precision. It’s also one of the most important and crucial steps of the whole optimization process and should always be the first step to implement in the SEO process.

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003

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Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. The keywords you think are the best may be totally different than the ones recommended by WordTracker. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

        

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