Keywords

How Do You Identify Keywords

Everything we do on the internet is based on keywords so it would make sense that potential clients who are looking for a specific product or information or even a service often times will type a series of keywords, keyword combination’s and/or keyword phrases.  So it would stand to reason that you must have a very strong keyword structure to your website.  Right?  Not so fast my friend!!

Its not all about keywords anymore but more importantly its about your title, description and content of your website.  You see, several years ago websites were indexed and categorized within a search engine solely based on the keywords of a website.  Unfortunately with most things a handful of webmasters ruined it for all the rest of us.  What they used to do was stuff their websites with what we called “false keywords” in an effort to draw potential visitors to what eventually became a spam site.  This caused keywords to become unreliable and misleading.  So back in 1998 search engines began dropping keywords as the sole source of placing websites within a search engine.  Sad, but unfortunately it was the only way they could combat unscrupulous webmasters.

Keywords are still a very powerful element in any website in today’s internet world.  However, it is more important that they “relate” to the content, title and description of a website.  Search engines today rely on over 200 factors when deciding how to rank and categorize or index a website but they closely monitor the relationship between what is seen on the page copy itself and the title, description and the keyword structure of a website.

Now that you have a short history about keywords, lets look at “how you identify keywords”

Elements of identifying keywords:

1.  These keywords usually have low to moderate competition.

2.  These keywords usually have low traffic volume.

3.  These keywords are usually very specific and describe an exact need or product.

4.  These keywords are usually an extension of very general words and referred to as long tail keywords.

5.  These keywords convert very well.

Keyword research tools come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and you’ll find some that are free and some that are not free.  The thing to remember is that a really good keyword research tool must have a way of measuring competition and traffic at the same time.   Also, remember that researching keywords is not a quick and easy thing to do.  It can be labor intensive as it should be.

The key is making sure you identify at least 50 keywords or more to insure you have a good number of keywords to begin building your website and its content as well as your Title and Description.