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Keywords and Keyphrases
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If you want your customers or prospect to be able to find your web site, among the millions and millions of web sites on the internet, they will probably use a search engine to narrow the possibilities.  When they do this, they type in a word or phrase that will lead them to your site - you hope.

Either during the development phase or after the fact, you can have your webmaster enter these key words or phrases into the text of the home page and into the meta tags as necessary.  We will not get into the details of where the keywords and phrases need to be placed but we will discuss the criteria for selecting the words or phrases.

Definition of a Keyword or Keyphrase:

This can be one word or a phrase.  If the word is relatively unique, you can use a single word such as GoldMine or QuickBooks.  Otherwise you will want to use a two or three word phrase such as Paint Shop Pro or Microsoft Front Page.  The objective is to identify 2 to 4 main keywords and up to 10 more (if needed) other keywords.  The main keywords will be used in the text appearing on the home page as close to the top of the page as you can get it.  Here you want to repeat the keyword up to 3 times, spelled the same, with the same plural or singular and the same capitalization. (Paint Shop Pro vs. paint shop pro - these are different keywords)

Key information on Keywords:

You want to select your keywords carefully.  You want words (phrases) that are used many times when people are searching the internet and words (phrases) that are referenced by as few web sites as possible, resulting in a high ratio of searches to web sites.  What does this mean?  If you have a phrase that is requested by the major search engines 160,000 times per month and is used by 12,000,000 web sites that would be a good word (phrase).  Consequently a word (phrase) that is searched for 5,000 times per month and is used by 1,000,000 web sites would not be a good selection.

How do I find this information?

There are services on the internet that can search the popularity of words (phrases) and give you the information needed for a proper analysis.  Such sites are www.bcentral.com and www.wordtracker.com   Another alternative would be to hire someone or a company such as Saunders Business Solutions to assist with the identification of good word (phrases).  You should be able to get the information mentioned in the section above so you can objectively analyze the potential effectiveness of each word.  For example, you could use the following formula to create a factor to compare potential words (phrases).  Times the word is looked up each month by the users of the search engines squared divided by the number of web sites that use the word (phrases).  160,000 x 160,000 = 25,600,000,000 / 12,000,000 = 2,133.33  This would be an excellent word to use - anything over 500 would be good.  The other example above nets 25 on the scale and would not be a good word.

Keys to success in finding your key word or phrase:

  1. Brainstorm all possible words (phrases)
  2. Do not limit to single words or only phrases
  3. Enter the words or phrases in the web site or submit to consultant
  4. Try the different words in various search engines to see if the correct sites appear
  5. Try to write a paragraph or two using the words (phrases) you selected and be sure it makes sense.
  6. Look for possible misspellings - these can be beneficial as well

Conclusion:

Take your time and really focus on this part of your site.  This is key to the success of your site if you are dependent on people finding your site.  There are many other factors you may want to consider once you have completed this section.  For a complete how to guide on making your web site work, click on this link.