Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

What are keywords?

Keywords or keyword phrases are the words people type into a search engine when they’re searching for something online. For example, someone looking for help to stop smoking may type how to stop smoking or stop smoking now or stop smoking in 30 days into the Google, Yahoo, or MSN search engines to find a site that answers their questions or can help them with their problems. These are keyword phrases they’ve typed in and what comes up is a list of websites with those keyword phrases in them.

You, as a marketer on the Internet, are on the other end of the keyword search. You want to bring people to your website or blog to buy your product(s) so you need to optimize your website with the keyword phrases people will be using to search for you. You can’t wait and hope for people to randomly find you what with so many websites out there today, so you have to drive traffic your way.

Keywords go in:

• articles that you submit to article directories
• content on your website
• your website’s meta tags – although not considered as important now, as major search engines don’t appear to index meta tags anymore.
• your website name if possible
• blog posts
• sales page for your product(s)
• pay per click campaigns
• Squidoo lens
• Hubpages
• podcasts
• videos
• pretty much anything you have online that you want to direct traffic to

Why should you use keywords?

The key to keywords is picking winning keyword phrases, or long tail keywords. Stop smoking gets over 300,000 searches a month, which is nice, but shows over 8 million sites with those keywords. Talk about tough competition! Stop smoking benefits gets around 1300 searches a month and there are 12,900 sites with those keywords. Which phrase would you rather compete with? Which one would give you a better chance of getting on the first or second page of Google?

To put it simply, keywords are how people find you through search engines. You need people, or traffic, to find your site in order to give information, make sales, grow your list, or do whatever your site is supposed to do. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your website or your widget is; no traffic means no sales.

What skills do you need?

Well, you need to know how to do keyword research and what parameters to use. There are differing opinions as to the number of (1) searches per month and (2) the number of websites with the keywords. Listen to what the experts have to say and do some testing of your own.

There are free keyword research tools. Free is good but time-consuming. There are also tools you can purchase that cut down on your research time. Keyword research services are also available to you for a monthly fee, or if you’d rather you can outsource the task.

What other strategies work well with using keywords?

• Outsourcing any of your needs; article writing, changing blog themes, researching, keyword research, building websites, graphics, etc
• Setting up a website
• Blogging ins and outs
• Good sales copy if you promote a product
• Article marketing
• How to get traffic
• List building
• Selling affiliate products
• Offering your services on the Internet
• Web 2.0
• Doing audio interviews
• Using PLR
• Mentoring or coaching

You might have some excellent content already on your website or blog that is not optimized for keyword phrases. It’s not too late to fix that! Go back to your blog, do some keyword research, and put your new keyword phrases into your better posts (especially the ones that are promoting something.) Just make sure you’re not “stuffing”, i.e. going overboard with the keywords, and that the article still makes sense. Remember you are writing for the reader first and the search engines second.

Tags: Articles, Website Basics, Website Basics Article