By Veselin Andreev Written in April 2003 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What do key words represent?

Key words - these are words that users enter in a given search engine to find services or products you offer. It is extremely important to know what key words they will use. Selecting appropriate for your activity key words is first thing you have to do because all other strategies are built on their right choice.

How to select appropriate for you key words?

Key words that will work best for you means to describe exactly what you offer and meanwhile to be well used by users. If your website is ranked number one in search engines results, after using key words that nobody uses, your work will be useless.

• Don't count just on you when selecting appropriate for your business key words. The users might have a completely different view about what to insert in search engines to find you.

Wonderful implement for defining appropriate key words is a specialized database called Wordtracker. First make a list with appropriate key words that you think are similar to your products or services. You could make such a list by asking your clients how they would search your services or products in Internet or you could view your competitors' websites about what key words they had used, but don't copy their information. Just look if they had used some key words that could be useful for you. Then use Wordtracker database, which will show you every key word's popularity, and how competitive it is (i.e. is it used a lot by users and how many websites are optimized for it). As more they are, as harder your website will reach top in search engines ranking.

By now, most web marketers know that Alexa.com ranking of their site is important. It gives an independent measure of your monthly unique visitors and reach on web to potential advertisers.

To potential clients, it gives them a vehicle by which they can research your site, and if your ranking or reviews are favorable, an air of credibility as well.

Across web, a trend is growing- webmasters display their graphical ranking on front pages of their sites, and there has been a resurgence in reviews of websites on Alexa.com by average web surfer. Yes, all this is common knowledge even among many new to selling their wares online.

But did you know that there are other ways you can use Alexa.com to your advantage, specifically exploiting some of their latest changes to your advantage? Here are 8 of 9 ways I've used Alexa as my Personal Secret Traffic Weapon in first month of my latest website's life.

You probably already knew that Alexa Internet is owned by Amazon. But did you know that reviews done on Alexa are now being linked to Amazon.com? Or that new reviews appear on Amazon.com as part of your Amazon profile?

To use this to your advantage, you can create a new Amazon profile centered around theme of your site. You can even get an article printed on Amazon by filling out their "So You'd Like to..." guide or Listmania. And if your ebook/newsletter/book has an ISBN number, you can also partner with a web master in a parallel market and review each other's book. The possibilities are as endless as your current Amazon.com profile.

Use wordtracker to find high ranking sites for semi-popular keywords.

Find sites in top ten of those keywords that don't have rankings yet. Suggest your site and several others as related links. It looks like Alexa is changing this information for sites that already have links to "Sites Linking In". For now, Related Links Suggestion Box is still available for every site by going to: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/editor?type=rl&url=http://www.yoursitename here.com - I have a feeling this may go away from way they've started hiding it since yesterday, so do this step as soon as possible.

If you've done this before, try partnering up with another web marketer and suggesting each other's links to a pre-determined number of sites. Or use your personal Amazon.com profile to suggest your link for other sites and your new target profile to suggest links for other sites.

Get a free trial of wordtracker here: http://freetrafficdirectory.com/wordtracker

Find out your competitor's ranking.