Choosing Keywords Keywords are words that people use to find your website. Keywords are
words entered into search field of a Search Engine to search for website pages related to or including those words. For example, if you are looking for blue shoes, you would type “blue shoes” into a Search Engine and find websites related to “blue shoes”. The phrase “blue shoes” is called a keyword phrase. To increase your Search Engine traffic you should choose a 1-3 word keyword phrase for each individual page of your website. You also should choose two or three keyword phrases that constitute overall theme of your website.
Methods of Choosing Keywords
Choosing good keywords is vital to increasing your website traffic. Before choosing which keywords to focus on, you should brainstorm possible keywords that people might use to find your website. After brainstorming keywords, then use a thesaurus to come up with more words. You can also use a tool like Google® Sandbox Tool. Enter in keywords and Google® Sandbox Tool will return a list of words it believes are related words. Other websites including, NicheBot, and Wordtracker offers a similar service as well.
Another method of finding keywords is to take a look at your competitors websites, and determine what keywords they are targeting. One method of doing this is to take a look at their keywords meta tag. In Internet explorer you can do this by:
1.Clicking on top pulldown menu “View”. 2.Scrolling down and click on menu item “Source”.
This will show you source code for that page. Then look for a line that looks like this:
This example uses keywords meta tag for home page of our dinosaur website. The words after “content=” are keywords that are considered important by person (in this case me) who wrote HTML for page. From this meta tag you can find out some of keywords that are being targeted on page. Add any keywords used in this tag to your list.
Once you have your list of keywords it's time to find out if anyone searches for them. You can do this by using Overture® search term suggestion tool. The Overture® search term suggestion tool shows you how many times a certain keyword was searched for previous month. You can use this tool to find out how many times people search for keywords related to your website. For example, go to Overture® search term suggestion tool and type in “dinosaur”. Then click button to right. You will now see a screen that shows a big table of keyword phrases that include word dinosaur. Here is an example snippet of list for September 2004:
