Archive for March, 2010
Successful business start up operators, when undertaking their own business website Search Engine Optimization effort, quickly learn that effective keyword selection is central to improving web traffic to the company website. Choosing a good phrase that describes your product or service, or one that characterizes the ‘need’ that your business organization fills is an essential part of choosing keywords that will attract traffic from Google and other search engines. SEO Consultants in Denver have seen this before and have developed the following guidelines to help small business and start ups select keywords that get results.
New companies and business start ups usually just guess at what would be a good set of keywords to use – or ignore the process completely. It should be understood though that these words describe for the search engines what the page is about. These descriptive terms or keywords must accurately describe not only the business, but the page content. Juggling these can be challenging as well.
But what really are ‘keywords?’ The keyword list is found in a section of the webpage that the viewer doesn’t generally see. The ‘keyword metatags’ provide words and phrases to the search engines that describe what your page is about. Readers can’t see the meta tags unless they look at the page source code.
Of greater importance however, keywords describe your business as well as the web page and should be used throughout the page. This confirms for the search engines that the page descriptive terms in the keywords are validated throughout the rest of the page. Google can then be fairly sure that the page contains content relevant to the keywords and will therefore improve the search engine rankings.
Keyword phrases, once identified, should be used in the page title, page headlines and reasonably placed throughout the text. Overuse of keywords is awkward and counter-productive as the search engines may see this as something they term ‘keyword stuffing.’ Pages they believe are overstuffed with keywords are devalued in the search engine algorithms or simply de-indexed.
There are many processes for selecting appropriate keywords. Google offers a tool that will read an already constructed page and offer ideas of what keywords might be appropriate for it. (This tool is part of the Google Adwords tool suite.) This tool is useful when one is unsure where to start in the keyword selection process. There are however, some things to avoid.
Among the pitfalls are keywords that are highly competitive. In other words, a new website should avoid terms for which a high number of competitors are seeking high ranking or paying a great deal of money for on their Adwords system. The Adwords keyword tool will display which possible search terms or keyword phrases are highly competitive and expensive. These search terms will generally require a longer period of time to produce results for – especially for new business start up pages.
At the point you identify a good keyword or phrase, use it in a Google search. If major corporate websites are returned as the number one result, you may want to keep refining your keywords. Companies such as Bank of America are not going to let go of their dominant search ranking position easily. (Having said that, there are ways to compete with the big boys, so keep reading.) At the outset, one probably wants to avoid going head-to-head with major companies for broad and popular search terms.
Keyword selection then is the art of finding a good descriptive term or phrase for your page that many people search for, but has a reduced level of competition to compete for. The Google Adwords tool can help here, too. The Google tool lists the relative level of Adword competition for certain terms and phrases, so look for terms with lower competition that still have traffic.
The Google Adwords system displays a ‘traffic’ number, but these are not exact number of searches or exposures that this search term produces. This tool is useful though for understanding which terms have more or fewer searches than others.
One of the biggest allies you have in the selection process is creativity. Including things like geographic terms or city names in the keyword string help set your page apart from those of major corporations. Local customers in need of services generally include a geographic parameter within the search, such as ‘Banks in Birmingham.’ This is much more descriptive than simply searching for ‘banks.’ Big corporations generally compete very poorly on a local level for business traffic, so this could be an opportunity for a local business to elbow its way into the local market for providing goods and services.
Be flexible in selecting keywords. Some that seem to look good may have to be abandoned if they produce traffic and not actual sales. Consumer behavior is an odd game for which there are no set rules. Error, trial and error frequently turns out to be a highly successful methodology for the small or start up business to select keywords.
SEO Consultants in Denver brings many years of experience in link building, keyword selection and website optimization to assist companies compete for new revenue on the internet. SEO Consultants Denver quickly deliver top page search engine rankings even for new pages.