Appropriate key words choice

Appropriate key words choice

By Veselin Andreev
Written in April 2003
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What do the key words represent?

Key words - these are the words that the 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 the appropriate for your activity key words is the first thing you have to do because all other strategies are built on their right choice.

How to select the 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 the search engines results, after using key words that nobody uses, your work will be useless.

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

Wonderful implement for defining the 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 the 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 the top in the search engines ranking.

• The best choice will be if the selected word isn't so competitive and has a very good popularity.

Besides Wordtracker gives you some additional possibilities for choosing key words, that weren't mentioned before but are in reality very appropriate. Be sure that you alternate, combine the words, selected up to the moment. Much more appropriate words could appear, too.

• To understand the way Wordtracker functions, use its free version, although its paid version offers much more functions.

Never count on orphaned key words!

Two or more words combination is a much better variant than an orphaned word. The orphaned word is more common, while the phrase much more specifies the search purpose. Let's suppose that you are a manufacturer of solid wood furnishings and take these two examples of key words.

"furnishings"

"solid wood furnishings"

The first word is orphaned, so it is very common. When a user searches some information by it, search engine will sort all the sites where the word is contained, without anything precise. There are maybe lots of sites. Besides people using this word during their search are not from your target audience. They are not among the users that could buy your products, they are not interested in your products and services.

By using the next phrase the user is aware of what exactly he is looking for and defines, limits the search to some definite kind of furnishings (solid wood furnishings in that case) and the relevant search engine sorts better, more precise results. The possibility your products to be bought in that case is bigger than in the previous one, maybe because the user needs these furnishings as he/she searches that way.

• That's why always add to a key word, corresponding to business like yours, some additional, specific only for your business words to define and to specify the process.