One of the fundamental tasks for creating a website that attracts traffic from Google and the common search engines is selecting useful and descriptive keywords for your effort. A good term or phrase that accurately describes your product or service or presents the “need” your company serves is essential to building your website into a sales and marketing tool. SEO Consultants in Denver have been through this process before and have developed the following guidelines to help small business and start ups select keywords that get results.
At start up, most enterprises don’t invest time in researching what keywords would work for the organization. That or the process is simply not accomplished. As keywords help search engines to understand the content of your page though, ignoring keyword selection may mean turning away visitors and customers from your business website.
Keywords are essentially descriptive terms – usually single words or a couple of multi word phrases – that describe what the business page is about. Keywords are stored in ‘metatags’ on the web page and aren’t generally seen unless a user views the source code for the page.
Of greater importance however, keywords describe your business as well as the web page and should be used throughout the page. This confirms for the search engines that the page descriptive terms in the keywords are validated throughout the rest of the page. Google can then be fairly sure that the page contains content relevant to the keywords and will therefore improve the search engine rankings.
Once selected, keywords and keyword phrases should be used in the page title and title tags, headlines within the page (the ‘h’ tags) and then again in the content or text within the page body. As long as the keywords can be reasonably used within the text, they should be. Page developers should be wary of overusing keywords though or otherwise engaging in ‘keyword stuffing.’ This practice is frowned upon by the search engines and causes the copy to read poorly.
There are many processes for selecting appropriate keywords. Google offers a tool that will read an already constructed page and offer ideas of what keywords might be appropriate for it. (This tool is part of the Google Adwords tool suite.) This tool is useful when one is unsure where to start in the keyword selection process. There are however, some things to avoid.
Reading this information, look for the number of searches and level of competition that exists for certain keywords that you propose to the system. Then – especially for new and start up websites – avoid keywords that have a great deal of competition associated with them. This information is provided by the system. These will usually require much greater effort as well as a longer time to start ranking well.
At the point you identify a good keyword or phrase, use it in a Google search. If major corporate websites are returned as the number one result, you may want to keep refining your keywords. Companies such as Bank of America are not going to let go of their dominant search ranking position easily. (Having said that, there are ways to compete with the big boys, so keep reading.) At the outset, one probably wants to avoid going head-to-head with major companies for broad and popular search terms.
Keyword identification is an ‘artform’ unto itself. Discovering or creating accurate and descriptive terms and phrases that many people search for, but for which not many big companies compete is a difficult chore. The Google Adwords tool is probably the best ally in this search.
It should be noted here that the traffic number provided by the Google Adwords tool is not an exact number. These should be used for comparison purposes only as they provide a comparative measure of the search activity that some terms receive.
A creative streak in keyword selection is also quite helpful. Companies doing business within a certain town or geographic area can use the name of that area within the keyword phrase. Setting one’s business page apart from others by using a geographic term (such as “Refrigerators in Dallas” is much more useful than simply searching for “Refrigerators”). Internet users with an immediate need frequently include a geographic name within their search.
Be flexible in selecting keywords. Some that seem to look good may have to be abandoned if they produce traffic and not actual sales. Consumer behavior is an odd game for which there are no set rules. Error, trial and error frequently turns out to be a highly successful methodology for the small or start up business to select keywords.
SEO Consultants in Denver brings many years of experience in link building, keyword selection and website optimization to help businesses win new sales. SEO Consultants Denver quickly achieve top page search engine rankings even for new pages.