Keywords
This week’s tips are going to be simple. We are going to talk
about keywords only and I’m going to give you a place to go and
download some very simple software that is a huge tool to have
to help you with your keywords and keyword phrases.
We have talked at some length about how robots crawl your site
and read the text that is included on your site. As a reminder,
let’s quickly review the process. Some robots crawl only domain
name, page title and keywords. Robots such as googlebot, that’s
Google’s robot name, crawl the content of the entire page. It is
also important to note that robots can and do crawl anything in
between the two ends of the spectrum I just gave you. Also,
there is no guarantee every page of your website will be crawled
by robots, so don’t bury important information deep into your
website somewhere.
I had said before to try to remember that when writing any kind
of text, choosing a domain name, creating a title to a web page,
naming a file or even a photograph, keep KEYWORDS in mind. Any
word that you that is put into your website, no matter what it
is for, can and usually is a keyword if crawled by a search
engine robot.
How do we know what to use for keywords? Some are obvious and
most are not. If you are experienced at “surfing” the Internet
and searching for information yourself, then let that be your
first indication as to how to do keywords. Ask yourself how do I
type in keywords or search words and search phrases. More than
likely you are typical of the everyday Internet searcher. Add
your keywords in much the same fashion.
Some searchers like to use single words while others type whole
sentences. The wave of the future seems to be the “whole
sentences” thing. Yahoo is experimenting now with a new search
tool called “Y!Q”. If you go to http://yq.search.yahoo.com you
should be able to try it out. It is called their “beta” version,
which means it is under construction. Instead of typing in “ball
cap” as a keyword, the Y!Q suggests I do something like this:
“Tell me about the history of baseball caps in America”. Try it
and see what happens. It’s pretty cool. What it is intended to
do is help the searcher find exactly what they are looking for
and eliminate those sites that really don’t pertain – now
wouldn’t that be nice.
If this is the wave of the future, then we should bear that in
mind when creating keywords and keyword phrases. It would also
be easy to assume that by utilizing that kind of search
“sentence”, the robots are crawling more than just keywords.
They must be crawling entire content – meaning every little
sentence, caption, description, picture name and copyright
information at the bottom of the page.
Let’s say that at my site where I sell ball caps, I am creating
keywords for my home page. The reason I am pointing specifically
at my home page is because keywords are needed for all pages and
all pages will have different keywords. Keywords on other pages
within your site should be specific to the content of what is on
each page.
I sell my custom ball caps as well as ball caps from every
professional sports team in the USA. The obvious keywords would
be: caps, ball caps, baseball caps, custom caps, custom ball
caps, custom baseball caps, professional caps, professional ball
caps……….! Get the idea? Bear in mind what you would type in if
you were looking for ball caps online.
How many keywords do you need? The best way I can answer that
is, that you need enough. There is no simple answer. It depends
on the site and it’s contents. If you were selling ice cubes, I
would wager there would be far less keywords to use than if you
were selling musical instruments.
I usually begin with the simple keyword and build up from there.
I would start with caps and end up with saying something like:
“baseball caps professional teams america”. Notice I left out
some words like a, the, in, of, at, etc. Search engines don’t
use those words so you don’t need to include them but it doesn’t
hurt if you do.
Before I give you the link to get the keyword software tool, I
would like to talk just briefly about how to add keywords to
your site. If you hire your site to be built by someone else, I
believe that it is imperative for you to be involved in the
creation as much as possible. Who knows your business better
than you? This applies when it comes to generating keywords. I
can tell you right up front, web designers can get real lazy
when it comes to adding keywords. And, they won’t be nearly as
creative as you can be because you know what you want to convey
to your potential customer.
If you build your own site, depending upon the software that you
are using, most times keywords can be added from a window that
appears probably by clicking on page properties. If it is not
real obvious, go to help and ask there. For Microsoft Frontpage
all I need to do is right click on the page that I have opened
in Frontpage and click on “page properties”. A window appears
where I can title my page, describe my page, and add my
keywords. I generate my keywords with notepad or something
similar and then copy and paste. Remember when naming your page
and adding a page description, keep those keywords in mind. In
other words don’t name your pages page 1, page 2, etc. Name them
custom ball caps, ball cap prices, etc. and make the page
description keyword rich and descriptive as possible. Many times
search engines display what you have written as a page
description on the results page. Have it say the right thing. I
might write: “The finest custom designed ball caps in America
plus all the professional sports teams ball caps.”
That said, here’s what I would like for you to do. I’m going to
give you a link that will take you to a site called “GoodKeywords”.
There on the opening page you’ll see free software for finding
good keywords. There are no gimmicks and no tricks, just like
they say. The software is small in size and shouldn’t take long
to download even if you are on dial-up.
Once loaded, open it up and play with it. Use this as a
guideline to help you in finding good keywords. It’s not the
answer to end all answers but I use it often. When you open the
window, across the top you’ll see some tabs. The first one I
want you to open is Overture. Overture is owned by yahoo and is
one of the top search engines. In the box below that type in a
keyword – preferably one of yours. Wait for the results. For
example if you type in “pizza”, you’ll see a list of words or
phrases containing the word pizza followed by a number. That
number tells you how popular a certain keyword is – most popular
is at the top and follow in descending order. Experiment with
other keywords to get an idea of how popular some words are. Try
general words like music, shopping, and things like that and
then compare them with some of your keywords.
From this list you can come up with many popular words that web
surfers use that can apply to your business. Take all your main
keywords that you can think of and plug them into this tool and
start creating. I’ll even tell you what I do. I open notepad and
shrink it down to about 3 inches square and then open good
keywords. I move both windows around on my screen so they are
side by side. I look at one screen and type into the other. One
important note: Keywords should be separated by a comma. No
spaces are necessary and don’t be afraid of misspelling words.
If you misspell a word leave it and continue on with the next
keyword spelling it correctly this time. The good part about
this is when someone types in a misspelled keyword the same as
you did, they’ll get your site first – insert a smiley face
here. This is one place that might actually pay off to be dumb.
I have to admit I get visitors because I misspell more than my
share. I once spelled Toby Keith as Tody Keith. I got a lot of
traffic that way. Odd isn’t it.
Create your keywords on a notepad and save them. You can come
back at anytime and build on them. As your site grows, it will
also change. You become more savvy about web design and you’ll
be creating new keywords and phrases all the time. How many is
enough? I have some pages on all my sites that have as few as 6
keywords and as many as several hundred.
Don’t believe that you have to have the most popular keywords to
have a successful web site. There are some sites that are very
competitive with several thousand companies vying for the same
customers. If your website is unique, chances are it will be
found easier by a smaller customer base seeking what you have.
My point is don’t add only the most popular keywords and
phrases. Get the less popular AND relevant ones as well. When
looking at the list for “pizza”, you might discover that a bit
down the list is an important keyword, “pizza recipe”. That gets
my entrepreneurial juices flowing and tells me that maybe a good
thing to offer on my site that sells pizza would be “free pizza
recipes”. LIGHT BULB! LIGHT BULB! FREE! FREE! FLASH! FLASH!
Finally, here’s the link: http://www.goodkeywords.com
Once you have created some good keywords, go ahead and add them
to your home page. The sooner you get them up the sooner the
robots will find them. This will begin moving you up the results
page so others will find you too.
Next week we will continue in the development of the
all-important home page and discuss writing keyword rich text
for our web site. If you have any trouble downloading the good
keywords software drop me an email and I’ll see if I can help.
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