Web Design Ideas That Would Make Your English Teacher Proud

Those are exciting and memorable times and everything seems to be going great when suddenly... you come home one afternoon and find that there's water all over your bathroom floor. What do you do? Suddenly you're introduced to the secret world of home repair. It has its own lingo, its own experts, its own giant box stores on the outskirts of every city.

Keyword strategies are the same. Perhaps before striking out on your own, you worked for a large corporation that had a department who created and maintained the company web site. Then, when you struck out on your own you started a web site and are now introduced to the virtual "industry" of keywords, keyword optimization, and keyword strategy. In fact, you're dealing with so many words, your English teacher would be proud!

As a business owner, obviously it is sales that are your ultimate goal. To get sales you need traffic. To get traffic you need to be accessible on web searches. To be accessible, you need to be ranked. To be ranked, you need to use smart keywords.

What are your competitors doing on their sites?

Google the keywords that you want to appear in search engines for. Then take the first 5 or 10 results and check out their source code. (To see a site's source code, just go to the menu line on your browser and (in Explorer) click "View" then "Source."

Check out their headers and meta tags and see what they are using for keywords. Pay attention to the order, how often the words are repeated, and the words that are not the keywords!

Once you've done this, you should have a good idea for what the robots read when they search and classify sites. Yes, it won't solve every problem and it won't make you number one in the rankings by doing this, but you'll help optimize your site even further.

Adwords

Google Adwords are the primary method that people use to advertise with keywords. If you're just starting your business, you should seriously consider AdWords as one of your primary means of online advertising.

Google AdWords let you come up on searches based on keywords and the people who are clicking on your site are warm leads! They're more willing to buy than people who search and click on natural search results. That's good news for you.

You shouldn't be satisfied with setting up a Google AdWords account and letting it run. Like all advertising, you should be constantly adjusting your advertisement by changing the words slightly now and then and monitoring the results. Find something that pulls better? Great! Keep it and adjust something else.

Overture to see what other people are searching

You've probably been to the Overture site and searched your keywords to see how they are searched. Pay attention to the additional, suggested terms that are searched as well. You may find that a keyword is searched often but is not over-populated by your competition. Get in there first!

Do your own little poll among your customers

This strategy is largely overlooked by business owners, which is too bad: You can learn so much from asking the people who are on your site!

Here are some ways you can do that.

Ask current customers how it is that they found you. You can do this in a friendly e-mail that you might send anyway when you follow up to thank them for the sale.

Just slip in a "by the way, I'm trying to improve my site so that other people can find me better. How did you find my site?"

Dust off your thesaurus

Another way to help improve your keywords usage is to think about other ways that people might search for your site. The English language is a complex organism and there are often words you can use that you may not have initially thought of. For example, instead of "make money online" try "make cash online." Yes, it's probably not searched nearly as often, but that's still a huge group of people typing the word "cash" instead of "money."