How to Choose Keywords for Your Website

How to Choose Keywords
to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

If you don't know yet what "keywords" refers to, then you REALLY need to read this article.

(Firstly, let it be said that there is some debate about keywords and how they affect your ranking. I trust Planet Ocean as the ultimate source of info. Their Search Engine Optimization eBook is guaranteed and they update their info every month because the search engines change their rules every month. Basically it boils down to this: keyword placement in meta tags- explained in a second- used to be crucially important to your ranking. It's no longer that important (but still helpful) in affecting your ranking with Google and the other big search engines. But the smaller search engines still use this strategy. And with the way the search engines change all the time, this could become more important again, anytime!)

HTML is the language of web pages. <b> if entered before a sentence and </b> after that sentence will make the sentence bold text. Keywords are added in a little something called meta tags. Meta tags allow the robots that "crawl" through the internet finding and indexing web pages, to see certain text. They are also defined by how they are not seen: by the reader on the web page. While invisible, they are very important.

The most important meta tags are the title, the description and the keywords. When people search for something, and your website appears in the search engine results, you want to be able to control the title for your website. You don't want the search engine to try to extrapolate a title and give you "Home" or something lame like that. My title is in purple below. What follows is the description that I gave for my home page. (Which I just realized should say "easy-to-follow". I'll have to fix that!)

Now: keywords. They tell the search engines what the content on your web page is all about. So, when someone is looking for "lawn gnomes", the search engines will send them to the most relevant websites.

You want people to find your web page any way possible. If you also write about pink lawn flamingos on your website, well, you want people looking for those to find you, too.

So, in your keywords, you put "flamingos, lawn gnomes".

But, not everyone is going to search for the same thing in the same way. Someone might search for "pink flamingos" while someone else might search for "plastic lawn flamingos" and someone else "pink plastic flamingos".

Your job is to try and think of all the possible ways that someone might be looking for that exact thing that you're talking about, and you enter that into your keywords meta tag. A little later, I'll tell you an easy, super-smart way of doing this.

(To actually enter keywords, titles and descriptions into your pages, see the bottom of this page.)

Okay, so you understand what keywords are and why you need them, right? They tell search engines that you have content on your website that someone else wants to read.

And content is the "keyword" in that sentence, excuse the pun. Because what you can't do, is put a bunch of keywords into your page that have nothing to do with your content to try to trick people into coming to your website. So, if you sell lawn gnomes and pink plastic flamingos, you can't put "good taste" in your keywords. Haha, just kidding. No, you can't put say, celebrity names or huge brand names in there, if you don't have anything to do with them.

If you do put a bunch of keywords into your meta tags without having any content on your page directly related to those keywords, you can be penalized and kicked out of the search engine ratings.

Some websites like to have very little content on their pages because it looks better. They see websites with lots of long content and they think, "Sheesh that person is long-winded. No one is going to read all that!" Maybe not, but the search engine 'bots do. The bots looove content.

The more that you get your audience's target keywords into your page content, the more relevant a website the search engines think you are. BUT, you can't go "spamming" your page with keywords over and over. The keywords have to be worked into natural sentences.

Sometimes, web page content is redundant and you might think that you need to change that so that it sounds better. For example, I've used the word "keywords" a lot on this page. I could change it sometimes and shorten it to just "words", for the same reason that you say "him" instead of someone's name over and over. But, the more that I can say "keywords" in my sentences, the more likely I will be ranked highly on the search engines in case anyone is searching for "keywords".

Besides, most people don't read every single word on a web page. They scan. And if people think that you are redundant in your copywriting, who cares? At least you knew how to bring them to what they were looking for, right? They should be happy about that and you too.

But, generic short forms like "words" is not the same thing as synonyms. It's good to include synonyms in your content, because different people search for the same things in different ways. One person might search for "moisturizer" while another person searches for "lotion". Know what I mean? So, work synonyms into your content too, IF it's something for which people will actually search.

Lots of people, maybe even most, write their web content first and then their keywords next. Seems logical. But it's not going to get you really far.

The best way to get really good traffic to your website, is to think of what people would be searching for, first, and then write your content around those words, working them in.

How do you know for what people would be searching, however? Wordtracker. This is a fabulous tool that will let you put in the word for which you think people are searching and it will tell you other related words. It will also tell you how many people search these words.

Then, you would take these words, and put them in your content and then into your keywords meta tags.

It's best to place keywords at the top of your site, in your page title, in your description. The search engine 'bots don't always search to the bottom of your page.

Using Long-chain Keywords

People who are in a buying mode don't search for general terms like "shoes", right? They search for brand names, colours, and styles.

When you are setting up titles for your web pages, and entering keywords into your meta tags, choose names/words that people would be searching for. For example, if you are a retailer who sells baby slings on your website, don't choose www. mywebsite. com/babyslings (or worse, just a bunch of numbers in the suffix) as the name of the page upon which your slings can be found. Put the brand name of the slings in there!

When the results appear on search engine pages, they show the page addresses, not just the domain names. And when people look at the address for your page, do you think they would rather go to a website that says www. mywebsite .com/hipmelonbabyslings.html or www. mywebsite .com/page/page/46872.htm ??

If the domain name in the search result matches the exact term that they're looking for, they're going to know right away that they got a relevant result. See here:

So, someone viewing this can see that there is a retailer called Elephant Shoe that is selling HipMelon slings (because they rock!). And someone who is searching for "hipmelon slings" is going to see this result and know they found what they were looking for.

Similarly, if you put these long-chain keywords into your meta tags (no more words than three), it will help people find that specific thing for which they're looking. This way, you are targeting BUYERS rather than people who are still at the researching stage.

Researchers will search for "sling" or "baby sling", whereas shoppers, who've already made their decision, will search for "hip melon baby sling".

Other places in which to place keywords:

in the file name of the photos which you place on your page. Know how when you name a photo, you can give it a name? Well, if you are selling lawn gnomes, use "lawn_gnome_1" for the name and for each successive photo, simply change the number. You're getting your keywords in there and it also makes it easier to find your photos when you're looking for them in your computer than if you named your photo IMG_6578.
in your title tags. You know that meta tag that says what the web page is all about? In the PinkPowerSuit.com example above, it was the wording in purple. Well, that's the title and you want to make sure that a keyword or two, describing the page, should be in there.
(IMPORTANT) in the anchor text of your incoming links. Anchor text is the text on a website that LOOKS like the link. You know that when you type out a domain name with a www and a .com at the end, it automatically becomes a link, right? www.pinkpowersuit.com . But when people don't want the www, .com, and all the other gibberish that sometimes comes with links, they simply type out some featured text and turn it into a link. So, when you see this link: PinkPowerSuit and you let your cursor hover over it, you'll see the full link appear in the bottom left-hand corner of your browser. "PinkPowerSuit" was the anchor text in that example. And the link provided would bring you to my home page.

Now, when people choose to link to your website from their website, you have no control over how they do that. They can write the word JerkHead and have that link to your site. Not likely. What's more likely is that they will type out your website name and then link that to your website. This is fine. But what is even better is for them to find a way to mention one of your target keywords and then link to you through that keyword. So, by me typing pouch custom baby slings and linking that directly to the HipMelon site, I'm doing the owner a big service. Good thing that I like her so much! ;-)

This linking strategy is one of the biggest techniques in the search engine game right now.

So, if you go to Who Links To You, enter your website domain name and then search, you'll see a list of websites that link to yours. Check the anchor text that leads them to your site. If you can think of a better wording that would help your rankings, email them and politely ask them if they could change the text to improve your rankings. Sure, they might say no, but if you explain how this benefits you (maybe forward them to this article) they might be just so thankful to you for sharing this tip that they'll oblige! If you're demanding about it, you may just lose the link altogether, so be careful.

How to Add Keywords into Your HTML

First, when you get to the page upon which you can change the HTML for your website, find the code that says and . Between these two codes, type:

<title>the title of your web page here</title>

Keep the characters, including spaces and commas, down to 250. When writing your keywords, keep it to three words per keyword phrase and leave out words like "to", "and", "but", "of", "is", "or", etc. The search engines ignore these words.

What not to do:

Do not put keywords on your web page at the bottom or anywhere, for the purpose of increasing your search engine optimization, without having them in natural sentences. Do not hide keywords on your page in the same colour font as the colour of your page. Also, do not include text smaller than 10pt (or size 2- same thing). If you do these things, the search engines might kick you out of their listings for trying to stuff keywords unnaturally into your page, even if that wasn't your intention.
Do not confuse the term "web site" with "web page". You want to use different keywords in your meta tags for every page. Every page should have a different title and description because they're all different. Don't make the mistake that some people make of describing every page the way they have their home page. Think of every page as an important portal to bringing them to your website.