Below are what I call the “10 commandments” for keywords.
To get started, select “keyword phrases” NOT keywords. This is very important. After all, the keyword itself is included in the keyword phrase.
Consider selecting different endings for your keywords (ing, ed, s, and es).
Check your brain and brainstorm with your friends to create a list of 25-50 keywords or keyword phrases.
Find out what keywords and keyword phrases your competitors are using. Do this by going to your competitor’s websites and clicking “View” on the top toolbar and then clicking “Source.”
Scroll down to the “Keywords Meta Tag” and you will see the keywords that this competitor finds important. Repeat this with all your major competitors.
Go to http://www.overture.com. Go to the “Term Suggestion Tool” and type in your keywords and keyword phrases. (Note that Overture groups singular and plural words together.)
Words with a count of 300 to 500 are good. Words with counts from 500 to 1000 are great (maybe). It depends on a term called KEI which we will talk about later in this article.
Use the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool at http://www.adwords.google.com.
The best place to get help with keywords is http://www.wordtracker.com. You can get a lot of free information here or pay around $7 and get even more information. The reason this site is so great is that it tells you how many times a keyword phrase is being searched for, but it also tells you how many other sites are competing with you for the keyword or keyword phrase.
This information is combined into a term called a “Keyword Effectiveness Index” or KEI. Generally, you shouldn’t select a keyword phrase with a KEI from 0 to 10. 10 to 100 is good. 100 to 400 is great and above 400 is a godsend.
This is all fully explained on the WordTacker website, so I won’t repeat it here. Please take the time to read all instructions and information.
You can only optimize a page for 2-5 keywords or 2-3 keyword phrases. Don’t try to do everything on your home page. Decide how many pages you are going to have (3-5 is the minimum number of pages for high search engine ranking). Then use all of the above techniques to build your keyword phrase list.
Once you’ve curated your list of keywords and keyword phrases, another good test to run is to find out which keywords people are actually spending their money on.
How do you do this? It’s simple. Go to http://www.Amazon.com and search for book titles with the selected keywords or keyword phrases. Then check how books rank in Amazon sales. The lower the number, the better.
A number of 5000 means you’re in the top 5% (assuming Amazon has a million books. Actually, they have many more). If people are spending money buying books (on the Internet) on your keywords, it tells me that you have a good chance of selling your products or services on the Internet as well.
The last point to consider is how many times do you use your keyword phrases on each page? I’ve seen it rank #1 with keyword phrase density from just 0.5% to over 20%. Google no longer likes high keyword densities. A good range to shoot for now is about 1% to 2%. Maybe a little higher, but not much. Google may increase this number in the future, but for now, keep your keyword phrase density low. Google calls a high keyword density “over-optimization” and can penalize a site for this.
That means if you have 300 words on your page, you would need to have between 6 and 21 keyword phrases on your page. Don’t overdo it and make your page sound silly. Read your page out loud and see if it sounds right. Get creative, and you can include lots of keyword phrases on your page and still make it sound reasonable. Also, it’s important to have a high keyword density in the first 150 words of the page, but remember that if your page is columnar, the first word is the first word in your LEFT navigation. panel. . . NOT the first word on your center panel.
Use your keywords and keyword phrases in a sentence.
Search engines define a sentence as a group of three or more words that begin with a capital letter and end with a period or other acceptable punctuation mark. This also means that you should put a period or question mark at the end of each heading or title so that it looks like a sentence and NOT a group of keywords.
This means that you should NEVER have just one list of keywords. Keywords that are not used in a sentence have very little (if any) value in increasing your search engine rankings. In fact, if you go overboard, search engines could tag you as keyword spam. This also means the keywords listed in the left navigation bar. The panel will NOT help your ranking. Search engine cops are not stupid. They know what you are trying to do if you insert keyword lists.
In short, be creative, take your time, and find the best keywords and keyword phrases. After all, what good would it do to get ranked #1 for keyword phrases that no one is actually searching for?
The information above doesn’t tell you everything about keywords and keyword phrases, but it does point you in the right direction. I did not repeat the instructions that are included in the websites that I refer you to.
Make sure that your keywords or keyword phrases are used in all of your outbound links, and try to get the sites that link to you to use your keywords or keyword phrases in their links to your site. Otherwise the links would not be very valuable to you.
