| The point is, if a searcher is looking to the term "foosbally" , they are most likely going to be interested in a site about the keyword "foosbally " rather than a site that may contain the term or reference "foosbally". From the perspective of the search engines, and I am mainly referencing the major players currently today which include Google™, Yahoo™ and MSN™, common sense would dictate that a site about "foosbally " would rank higher in the search results than other sites that may contain or reference the keyword foosbally ". As the search engine algorithms churn through millions of sites indexed, niche sites stand to fair better in the search results and rank higher for keywords focusing on the content of sites than ones that don't. Keep this in mind as you begin to layout a plan for your website. It is probably the most important factor to consider when you are building your site. This helps you to keep your site focused on the topic you are creating it for, as well as keep a reference to what you need to have for any advertising campaigns you may start, like using your keywords in ppc advertising, for example. A couple of good resources to get more information about search engine algorithms are Search Marketing Strategies, First Edition : A Marketer "s Guide to Objective Driven Success from Search Engines (Unbound) and Understanding Search Engines: Mathematical Modeling and Text Retrieval (Software, Environments, Tools), Second Edition (Paperback) |
Optimizing for the correct keywords
Basically "Get real " about what keywords you feel your website can be ranked for. Ask your customers, someone outside of your business or friends what keywords they would use to find your site. Matching your target keywords to the search queries that users are typing into the search engine every day is critical to getting free traffic from the search engines to help make your web site successful.If you have a ten page website in a highly competitive market then ranking naturally for the major terms will be close to impossible. Use the Overture keyword tool together with the number of results on Google to find out what keywords are searched for and how many other websites are targeting them. If you are lucky then you might even find a popular keyword that not many other websites are optimized for. Alternatively a good tool for this job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.
Now if "foosbally " was a very popular keyword would I want to use it? Probably not because the competition would be fierce. Likewise, if you look at the results for "foosbally " then you can probable figure that there are not very many search requests for this keyword or other webmasters would have jumped on it (if foosbally really existed) and optimized their sites to rank well on keyword searches for "foosbally" . |
Chapters
