Keywords for Beginners

It's not enough to have your site or blog to rank well in the search engines; it has to place highly for words that are important to your business. This is why you need to understand keyword analysis, the art and science of identifying keywords that describe your business and are popular with the public. People who overlook this element usually have sites that don't rank well in search engines. If they do rank, they frequently do so for keywords that no one is looking for.

For example, if a realtor sells condos in the Marietta suburb of Northeast Atlanta and his Web site is "GreatCondosYouWillLove.com," the search engines probably would rank the site well for the search term "great condos you will love." This is because those words are in his site name and there is very little competition for that exact phrase. But that wouldn't help him much, because it's doubtful anyone would search for those exact words. And a Web site that ranks highly for search terms that no one is looking for might as well be invisible.

All keywords are not created equal

To allow the largest number of people to find his site, his keywords must be specific. He could try using the search term "Atlanta Georgia Real Estate," which is somewhat specific and has an average of 130,000 people, per engine, searching for that phrase every month. But a search for "Atlanta Georgia Real Estate" in a major search engine also reveals that there are over five million competing sites.

This is why keyword analysis is important. It's essential to find search terms that accurately describe your business, are frequently searched by the public and don't have too many competing Web sites. For example, if you found a keyword that had several thousand or more people searching for it, and the competing Web sites numbered two million or less, your site probably would rank very well. This is not to say that your site wouldn't rank well if the number of competing Web sites were greater than two million. But to do so, your site would have to have all aspects of Web optimization executed perfectly.

Since the number of key phrases anyone can use on a site before diluting their effectiveness in the search engines is limited, it's critical to focus on words that give you the most impact. But here's where it gets confusing: even search terms that are quite specific to your business can be duds. You might think featuring the phrases "Marietta Georgia real estate" or "Marietta Georgia condos" on "GreatCondosYouWillLove.com" would help the site rank highly when people search for condos in Marietta. But you'd probably be surprised to know that virtually no one is searching for either of those terms. So, although it's important to be specific with your keywords so you differentiate your site, again, if no one is actually searching for the terms you have on your site, it still won't be found.

How to do the analysis yourself

To analyze your keywords, you need two tools: a keyword finder program, such as Wordtracker, and any major search engine. (Click here for a list of the major search engines.) Wordtracker will display which keywords are being searched for most frequently.

Once you've found keywords that are both relevant to your site and have a significant number of people searching for them, you can use the search engine to find out how many sites are competing with yours. Simply enter the final keywords you've chosen into the engine, one word or phrase at a time, to see how many sites come up under each term.

This article really only covers the basics of how to find the right keywords. For more information and tips from the experts, click here for a free nine-lesson e-mail course from the folks at WordTracker. This no-obligation course will give you specific tips you can use to drastically improve your search engine presence.