It will be cliche to say that the internet is vastly infinite. Across the planet, there are about 1.8 billion active web surfers who come online. Plus, there are probably billions upon trillions of websites that can be visited on a daily basis. If you are running your own website, shouldn’t you be doing something to make it to stand out from the crowd?
When you create your website, what are the factors that you consider most important?
Is it the color scheme, the graphics, number of pages, or the content? If you answered all of the above, then you are on the right track to creating a profitable site that people will want to visit. But what else can you do to get more traffic to come into your site? The answer lies in SEO and keywords.
Search engine optimisation uses tons of new methods and strategies to make websites more visible on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Lycos, and many more. Day in and day out, these search engines release bots or spiders to crawl across the web and find relevant websites that they can index to include on search engine results pages (SERPs). If a website is indexed, and a certain web surfer makes a query that is related to that site (using a set of keywords or keyphrases), then you can expect its links to be displayed on Yahoo or Google’s SERPs.
But how can you make Google or Yahoo bots index your website more effectively?
This is where keywords are most important. Say for instance your website is about selling shoes for babies, then the most likely keywords that are relevant to your site include “baby shoes”, “shoes for babies”, “babies shoes for sale”, and so on. In this regard, you should optimize your content to use these keywords and other similar or related keyword combination. To get other possible combinations of words use Google Wheel (a pretty new tool) or the Google AdWords tool – choose “Ideas containing my search terms”.
Your site should contain adequate content, and it is best to integrate these keywords in your articles, keeping in mind relevance and good quality. Already too much? Oh, well… then take note that keywords should not be overstuffed into one page, as search engine bots can view your content as malicious or spammy, and this in turn prevents your site from getting indexed.
Let’s see what we already have:
- Write at least 500 words content on every page – make it interesting
- Include relevant keywords but not too many – 2-3 keywords per page
- Write your content for users not Googlebot
Now it becomes really hard! But who said it was going to be easy?
Where else can you use keywords? Besides integrating them into your sentences and paragraphs, keywords may also be used to tag images and other elements in your website. You should also use keywords to name the pages of your website, as this makes it easier for bots to go through every page to index its content.
Choosing the best keywords for your site does not only involve mixing and matching phrases and combos of words. You should do keyword research to determine how strongly used some keywords are compared to those used by competitor websites. A great tip would be to try (again) the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which indicates how similar websites are using keywords compared to the ones you have optimized your site with.
Some other great tools for you to use to get good keywords will be:
Keyword research should be done regularly, because trends in keyword popularity and strength tend to change in a short span of time. In this way, you can be updated with the best keywords for your site, so you can in turn update your content to drive more traffic.
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This was a guest post written by Vic Dinovici a Toronto SEO Consultant – if you would like to do your own guest post on North South Media then, please do get in touch.
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