Choosing The Best Keywords To Drive Traffic To Your Internet Business
Getting an internet business to appear on the first page of search engine results
is a common goal for most webmasters, yet few possess the skills to actually achieve it. There are many steps to take in order to be found for terms related to your website, and taking your time to research the best possible phrases for your website, is an important step on the ladder.
Many webmasters make the mistake of assuming that a ranking for one generic term related to their site will turn their website into a profitable success. Although that one generic term may provide a good stream of traffic and brand awareness, this doesn't mean the traffic will convert into sales or leads, and the costs of targeting that term will tower over your return on investment.
It is best for the webmaster to target multiple terms that not only drive traffic, but also lead to that all important conversion.
First of all you need to consider who your target audience is and the purpose of your site. Do you sell products online? Do you offer services? Is it more content focused? There are all sorts of potential visitors which will have varying ways of finding your site, so understanding your audience, and the reasons they will visit, will help focus your efforts.
With this in mind, you can now consider those generic terms that you think people will use to try and find your website. It shouldn't just be one term, a trap that many webmasters fall into is assuming that one term will provide enough traffic to sustain business and are surprised that business doesn't increase if they do achieve that ranking. Consider all of the possible phrases and themes of your site, even using a thesaurus to find related terms or checking competitor websites for ideas. It can be surprising just what terms your potential visitors will be using.
Once you have put together a list of short generic terms, you can start using the free tools, that most search engines provide, to gauge how popular and competitive those terms are, and also refine those generic terms to be more targeted to your websites purpose. The first step is to find out the popularity of terms, which can be done using various keyword suggestion tools, google provides all of the search tools you need free.
Keyword suggestion tools tell you which terms were typed into searches, and how many searches were conducted on those terms. Typing a phrase in, will return a selection of alternative phrases that contain your generic term, alternative suggestions with a similar theme and also an estimate of how much traffic the phrase provides per month. These tools can be flawed as they query different search engines and the traffic estimations can be inaccurate, but they are still good for getting a ball park estimation of the amount of searches conducted, and for suggesting multiple terms you may never have thought of targeting.
The next step in picking the best terms is checking how competitive they are. Ideally you want to find terms that have high volume traffic but few websites competing to rank for that term, and you can use various tricks to judge this. Any page that is optimised for a term will at least have that term in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site, so by going to Google and using the queries intitle:"phrase here" and inanchor:"phrase here", you can figure out how many other pages have optimised for your chosen phrase.
The lower the number for these searches, the less competitive the term is. Using these free tools, should have provided you with a list of terms that are much more targeted than your original generic phrases. These can include breaking your term down by geographical location, or a specific product. You will be able to optimise your site for multiple phrases, remember that search engines index web pages and not just websites. That means all of the pages in your site can be found in search engines, which in turn means all of those pages can be optimised for different terms.
You may also want to consider the long tail of search phrases. These are obscure multi word phrases that are only searched a couple of times, but are so specific they can end up being the most targeted terms and carry with them higher conversion rates. The best way to target the long tail is to have a content rich site, the more content you have the more likely you are to be picked up for obscure terms that can be found in your copy.
by: Stuart Treadwell
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