Optimizing your Website using the Right Keywords and Phrases

Critical to successful online marketing and promotion is your web site's HTML. From your title, keywords, meta tags, and text, to your overall site design, your keywords will play a very important role when optimizing your site. If your site doesn't rank in the top 10 or 20 when doing a keyword search at the top search engines, your target audience won't be able to find you.

About 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from the eight major search engines. Most people will go to a search engine, type in a keyword or keyword phrase and look through the top 10 - 20 results. Most of the time they'll find what they're looking for in the first 10 results. The percentage of click throughs are even smaller. Listing near the top and grabbing the attention of your target audience is the top priority.

The first step to getting ranked high in the search engines and improving your listings, is selecting the best keywords and phrases that best reflect the content of your website. Now many of us probably know this but it is often easier said than done, especially when the site caters to a market niche that is either seldom sought for or in the case of a subject like MP3, is hotly contested for.

There are a number of people who specialize in assisting owners of web sites, and for those who are building a web site that is going to be their livelihood, I would recommend using one of them; however, for those who wish to do it themselves there are a number of simple steps that when followed can really help.

First of all, put yourself in the shoes of your customers. What keywords would you use if you were a customer searching for products/services particular to your web site, particularly if your web site caters to a local or regional market place? Next look at what keywords are most relevant to your site.

To help you choose effective keywords and keyword phrases, there are two important steps. First of all, get a Thesaurus and investigate synonyms for your original keywords. Write these words down on a sheet of paper. Next, perform your keyword and keyword phrases search at the major engines. Pay close attention to the web sites that rank 1 through 10. View the source code of these pages. Pay close attention to their placement of keywords in the and tags. Next, do a search for your competitor's web sites and view their HTML source code. Noticing patterns is your key to ranking above them.

Using software called Word Tracker can help to determine what keywords people are searching for that relates most closely to what the web site is offering, especially when the web site does not contain subject that is widely sought after. http://www.wordtracker.com/

The key is understanding how to integrate widely sought after phrases into the web site, without tricking the engines and of course, your visitors.

One way is to include links and content into the site, which is being highly sought after, that most closely matches information of your web site. Then you use keywords and phrases that match the highly sought after added links and content.

Another suggestion is to utilize an award-winning new product called WebPositionGold, http://www.web-gold.net/ developed by FirstPlace Software which can help you improve your listings by:

1. Generating HTML pages that are designed to rank near the top of the search results.
   
   
2. Analyzing your existing Web pages and gives plain-English advice on how to improve them.
   
   
3. Includes a simple, built-in HTML editor for fast and easy changes.
   
   
4. Assisting in uploading your new and changed pages.
   
   
5. Submits your pages to the major search engines automatically.
   
   
6. Reporting your positions on each search engine for each keyword you are targeting.
   
   
7. Tracking the number of visitors to your site, where they came from, and what keywords they used to find you.

The key to optimizing your web site is to be flexible to making changes to your web site that will help optimize it for the search engines. Above all, constantly be improving on the above.

Once you have your site optimized, try our FREE Google SiteMaps tool, this will allow the major search engines to index your site fully and complely, showing the last time your site was crawled or any problems or errors you may have.