Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites.  But in order for visitors to reach their destination – your website – you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your site.  You do this using carefully chosen keywords.

Finding the exact right keywords or phrases can bring hoards of traffic right to your door.  But if your keywords are too general or over-used, the possibility of visitors making it to your site decreases dramatically.

You probably think you already know what keywords you should be using.  Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed specific steps, you are probably WRONG.  It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network.  You need to be able to think like a consumer from the outside looking into your business.  Your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding of your business may be significantly different.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can.  You will find that the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

To evaluate the effectiveness of your keywords, take into consideration these three elements:

1. popularity
2. specificity
3. motivation

Of these three elements, popularity is the easiest to evaluate.  The more hits on a keyword, the more popular it is.  So the more popular your keyword is, the more likely that it will be typed into a search engine, which will then bring up your URL.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice.  You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

The third factor to consider is consumer motivation.  Again, this requires you to put yourself in the consumer’s position rather than the seller position to determine what prompts the consumer to type specific keywords or phrases into the search engine. 

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done.  Evaluating keyword performance across a variety of search engines is essential, because trends change, as does popular language.  The most important factor in evaluating the efficiency of a keyword or phrase is to determine which of them not only bring you traffic, but direct customers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is!  But it is work that will ultimately pay off in terms of generating traffic and sales for your business.

– Resource Box –
This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged. For more tools, tips, and tricks of the trade, go to: www.elitewebstrategies.com – Empowering You to Empower Your Business. Copyright 2007 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.

Below are 4 components that affect your search engine ranking.

1. Title Bar – The title bar is the colored bar or tab in your browser that is just above the top of your page. The title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

To change your page’s title bar, you will need to access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. The title tag is located near the top of the page. Type in your desired title between the two title tags: <title>Your Text</title>.

2. Content – The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words.

3. Meta Tags – Next we come to what are called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find the meta tags on your page, you must again view the code. Follow the same steps as listed above for checking your title tag. The meta tags are located beneath the title tag. A meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. Following the = sign should be a list of keywords pertinent to that particular page.

If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put it in. This may not do a lot for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

4. Link Popularity – Link popularity is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to on your links page. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

– Resource Box –
This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged. For more tools, tips, and tricks of the trade, go to: www.elitewebstrategies.com – Empowering You to Empower Your Business. Copyright 2007 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc.