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.

Keyword phrases, once identified, should be used in the page title, page headlines and reasonably placed throughout the text. Overuse of keywords is awkward and counter-productive as the search engines may see this as something they term ‘keyword stuffing.’ Pages they believe are overstuffed with keywords are devalued in the search engine algorithms or simply de-indexed.

The process for selecting keywords can take many forms. Google provides a tool within the Adwords suite that helps evaluate keywords and provides the number of possible searches or ‘impressions’ that a top Google (paid) advertisement could be expected to make. This is useful information even though you are not paying for an advertisement on these pages.

Avoid keywords that have a great deal of competition in Google Adwords. The same Adwords tool will display how much competition there is for a keyword or keyword phrase. Although not universally true, these keywords take longer to compete for and to rank well – especially for newer pages.

When you believe you may have discovered a good keyword phrase, run a Google search. If major corporate websites appear at the top of the results page, reconsider your choice. If your company page would be up against someone like Bank of America for your keyword term, rest assured that they will ruthlessly compete against anyone using that term – which decreases your opportunity to rank well. (There is a way to compete with the big guys just not head-to-head using their keywords. See the note on including a geographic term below.)

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.

The Google Adwords system displays a ‘traffic’ number, but these are not exact number of searches or exposures that this search term produces. This tool is useful though for understanding which terms have more or fewer searches than others.

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 search engine optimization to assist businesses win new or start up revenue on the internet. SEO Consultants Denver quickly deliver top page search engine rankings even for new or start up pages.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 10:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.