Keywords:

Keywords were touched upon earlier in this article, however I'd like to expand the information for you to assist with the SEO of your site. Your competition are all vying for the best set of words (or the most often used words) that users use to find information about bicycles. How do you know what words or sentences to use? This becomes a somewhat complicated however spending a little time learning about it can save you a lot of grief, bring you a lot of traffic, and increase your search engine ranking.

Stop and think about what you would type into a search engine to buy a bicycle. Would it be the manufacturer's name? Maybe it would be a bike type. Would you use the word bike or bicycle in your query? All of these are going to bring up different results. So one thing you do as you type in your searches is go to the first, non-paying result on the search engine's page and use your view source command.

In Internet Explorer that is simply a right mouse click on the page and then scrolling down to the view source option. Take a look at their keywords and copy them into a file, noting what you searched with and what type of company showed up. Do this a few times using various searches and you will end up with a generic list. Some will apply to what you do. Keep those. Delete the rest.

Now you can go to one of the many Keyword Generators (Google provides an excellent one at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) that are available on the Internet. Start typing in the keywords in your list or with Google's you can actually direct it toward your page. The generator will give you many more ideas.

Again, take the ones that apply to what you're doing and ignore the rest. Our example web site "Auto Surf News" is using 18 keywords or sentences. Each one separated by a comma and a space. Another site I know uses 103. This is another area where SEO specialists' opinions vary. Some say fewer is better, some say more is better, some say never to exceed a certain number.

Personally I have found little difference because eventually you will find the keywords that work best for your site. A good way to test this is to read each page, see how many of the keywords you have in the meta tag area are part of the page's content. I find that if at least half of the keywords are included on the page then the number of keywords will not make much difference.

The trick is to find out what words the users are searching when looking for a bike. Find those and up will go your ranking. With a little trial and error, some patience - because it takes time to have your first set of keywords indexed by that spider - and more time for you to analyse which words bring in traffic you will find your ultimate set of keywords. For tracking words your hosting site usually tracks this for you - ask them - if not you will need a software package to track this or an online tracker like Site Meter.

You'll find certain words or phrases are used more often than others words. Remove the ones used less and try others. Again wait. Two or three months should give you an indication of the words you kept compared to the ones you added. Again keep the best get rid of the rest. Before long you will have an excellent set of keywords that you can use for a very long time.

Remember though, if you make major content changes to your page, you will have to change around some of your keywords, however your main keywords, the ones that attract people to the overall site will remain. You'll just be tweaking pages as content changes.

Read Part 6 - Read Part 8