Search Engine Optimization--Keywords

Before you optimize your website or buy pay-per-click (PPC) traffic, you should make sure you are using the best keywords. Are users really searching for info about your product? What keywords are they searching for?

With the Internet, there is no need to guess whether you're using the right keywords. There are software tools that can tell you exactly how many searches were performed on them.

One keyword tool is spacky.com. It's free. And when you enter a keyword, it shows the monthly search volume for that term on Google, Overture/Yahoo, and Microsoft Network. Another keyword research and discovery tool is wordtracker.com.

Often, the keywords used most are not the ones you picked. In addition, small variations in keywords can make a big difference in results.

Let's say you want to optimize a website for people looking to buy costumes.

We can optimize the home page copy for the keyword "costumes".

And when I use spacky.com to check, sure enough there were 16.6 million searches on "costumes" on Google this month.

But there were 20.4 million searches on Google this month on "costume."

This tells me that I should optimize the home page copy for "costume" and not "costumes."

I would never have known that had I not checked.

In addition, spacky.com displays a long list of related terms and their search volumes, so you can choose the keywords that are searched most frequently.

There are three typical online marketing activities that can benefit from keyword research.

Each page on your website should be optimized for at least one keyword related to what you're selling.

Use it for pay-per-click advertising. Even a good PPC ad will generate mediocre results if you bid on the wrong keywords.

The third is determining the feasibility of new products.

Example: You decide to write and sell an e-book on how to make a costume. You think Halloween is very popular holiday, but you aren't sure.

But even if you were sure that Halloween is popular, that doesn't mean the book will sell. Remember, we are not selling in bookstores. We are selling on the Internet. And for a product to be successful online, potential buyers must be searching the Internet for information related to it.

A good rule of thumb is that the keyword must have at least 100,000 searches a month on Google to be successful online. "Costumes" with 16.6 million and "costume" with 20.4 million both pass with flying colors.

You can also check your competitors and see what keywords they're using to optimize their websites. Yeah, it's legal.

You can see what keywords your competitors are using by reading the source codes on their websites. "Source code" is the programming language used to build a website. And in optimized websites, the source codes for the pages include keyword lists called meta tags. The most important meta tags to check are the title tag, description tag, and keywords tag.

To find the keywords in a competitor's meta tags, go to his home page. Click "view" and then choose "source." A window will appear displaying the page's source code with the meta tags clearly labeled as title, description, and keywords. The keywords appear between symbols like these:

In minutes, you will know all the keywords your competitor has optimized his site for.

Knowing this can help you optimize your own website to out do the competitor, by knowing what keywords more people are searching.