Keyword Marketing and all its secrets

November 19, 2003

Some people in business think they have what they feel is a successful web site. It�s large, has plenty of good, relevant content and was designed in a way to help most users visiting the site. It is also listed in most of the major search engines. But the question is, where are the visitors?

Is it possible that, using a very specific keyword or key phrase they cannot find your site in most of the same search engines? Most likely, that is very often what we discover when we start making a survey for a particular client.

More than ever at Rank for Sales we discover that a lot of web sites and web pages fail in the search engine ranking race simply because of bad keyword or key phrase optimization. Now some search query optimization may have been done at one time or another, but was either done incorrectly or some of the keywords used daily by the real searchers have changed over time. How to find the right keyword combination is a science and an art at the same time!

Now before we start finger-pointing anybody, it�s not that webmasters are not carefully optimizing their web pages for keywords and key phrases. They most certainly do and they generally do it well. The problem is that they are not using the right keyword and key phrase combinations, the very ones used by the large majority of the potential visitors and customers to any given commercial web site on any given day.

If you were to make a search for a page on the major search engines with relative and specific keywords, what keyword or key phrase would you use?

"Keyword and marketing", "optimize keywords", "keyword ranking" or, what exactly? Now maybe it is that your web users are searching for "search engine keyword placement"? If you are like most people, it is hard to say now would you agree? Your first guess could probably be wrong. The simple reason to that is that most people do not think alike!

If you are really serious in the careful keyword and key phrase optimization of any commercial web site, what you need is a specialized tool that will tell you exactly wich keywords and key phrases real day-to-day searchers are using when shopping for the products or services offered by a company like yours.

You need a detailed list putting the most frequently used keywords and search queries right at the top. Some webmasters have been using for quite a while one of the free keyword generator sites available. Some pay-per-click search engines, i.e. search portal companies that effectively sell text ads to various search engines, can in fact provide some suggestions or similar tools for some of their clients.

The most popular one is the Overture suggestion portal. They could possibly give you a certain number of alternative keywords or key phrase to the search queries you may have entered into the search form.

Now the problem is that these curso photoshop website are currently used by some webmasters and a limited number of unsophisticated optimizers, but not your regular, day-to-day real searchers. Therefore, the results coming out can at times be misled or misinterpreted, and generally do not give a true realistic picture of what really takes place out there on the Internet.

For example, if a person is just looking for alternative keywords or search queries to optimize a particular web site, some of the above tools may offer some help.

Additionally, all webmasters are also normal human beings like everyone else. One could assume that, if some keyword or key phrase combinations haven't been thought of by most of these webmasters, some would be inclined in thinking that those particular queries are probably not worth considering for optimization in the first place. Again, we need to investigate a bit more in the subject.

Over time, we found that the search engines are not in a position, nor is it their mandate to supply anybody with an ordered list of search engine keywords and key phrases relevant to any particular topic. In certain cases, some of them might tell you what could be some of the most popular search queries this month or the month before. But generally speaking, that could signal you to go elsewhere.

The Wordtracker professional search tool
If you are like most people, you might find that searching through various databases on your typical working day could be very time consuming, to say the least. Instead, what we use at Rank for $ales is the Wordtracker professional search tool. Today, WordTracker is the best and the most popular fee-based keyword and key phrase analyzer on the Internet and is used by most serious search engine optimization professionals we know of. We use it daily and we have no idea how we could ever achieve the work we do without such an important resource.

WordTracker is based on meta search queries made by ordinary people searching the web everyday, wich means that the keyword and key phrase combinations found are much more reliable than the pay-per-click listings generated by the Overture suggestion tool. Over time, we have also found that the data generated is also more objective. Now the people at Wordtracker know that you should not always rely on the most competitive keyword and search query combinations.

These are more or less dictated by large corporations that can afford to allocate much bigger budgets on various search engine marketing and sales campaigns. We recommend that it just might be as sensible to optimize for less popular key phrases or search terms for your industry!

Another technique we use is we often write several articles on a certain topic that is relevant on that web site and each article is optimized for a certain keyword or key phrase. We make certain they are truly unique articles so as not to use the same basic text, just simply exchanging a few keyword combinations here and there. Failure to do that could be termed as spamming and is certainly frowned upon by most of the major search engines.

Over the years, GCIS, Rank for $ales's parent company, has developed other SEO tools and applications that help us find the delicate balance between the total number of competing web sites for each search engine and the exact popularity of their search terms.

In fact, some of the tools we have developed make a strong case out of discovering often used keywords and key phrases that have little or no competition in the major search engines. That in itself, we often consider as a bonus because it is extremely hard at times to consistently come up with alternative keywords or search queries that may seldom be used by competitors but that are used almost daily by the real searching public.

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003

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Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. The keywords you think are the best may be totally different than the ones recommended by WordTracker. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

        

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