Generating high traffic to your web site can be costly, or not, depending on time and effort you commit to the business.

One of the easiest, least expensive and most effective ways to get visitors is via a concept called ‘Keyword Density’.

Mini Site Profits by Phil Wiley was my first and most valuable introduction to keyword density and would eventually become the focus of my online marketing campaigns.

Wiley tells how many search engines spider the Internet for sites containing keywords similar to those someone has just keyed into a search engine. The more times those words appear on your site - conditionally - the more chance you’ll get that high ranking.

But search engines aim for relevance, too, so a site actually bearing little relevance to specific terms might rank high for a short while, until human editors come in, check it out, then abandon the site as irrelevant to their customers.

It’s all about ‘content’ which for our purposes means useful articles, information and advice which search engines consider valuable to their customers, rather than pages packed with advertisements and little else (unless they’re getting paid for it via pay per click promotions, of course!).

For example, ‘sex’ is a hot topic on the Internet and the subject of millions of searches every month. How wonderful for your site to appear to everyone searching for ‘sex’ - (one day I will rephrase that) - who happens upon pages offering discount holidays, printer refill cartridges, golf clubs, pencils, but not sex!

The point is, anyone using specific techniques to lift their own non-sex-related site high on the listings when someone keys ‘sex’ into search engines will soon be exposed and probably banned for life from most search engine listings. By ‘techniques’ I mean pasting the word ‘sex’ all over the background of your site selling lawn mowers, or calling your site ‘Everything to Do with Sex’ when your site bears no relevance at all to the ‘S’ word.

Here are a few ways to use keyword density to increase your chance of a higher ranking over site owners who don’t try quite so hard:

About The Author

Avril Harper is the author of ‘Keyword Density and How to Get A Top Listing on Major Search Engines’ and ‘How to Turn a Handful of Classified Ads. into a Reliable, Regular, Repeat Income for Life’ which are yours free by emailing avril@publishingcircles.com with subject ‘Keywords Report’. More articles can be obtained at www.articlefactory.com

A hundreds of new websites are being launched every day on different aspects of systems and listed on search engines. So there is a very tough competition between various sites. But only a handful of them survive and get good ranking by doing SEO. Keywords play a very important role in SEO, when search engine bot hit your site it only gets text and from that text it will try to get following details:-

1) Type of business you are doing
2) Type of keywords you are using.

By the business it will put you in a certain kind of category and from the keywords it will calculate how many good keywords you have in the text. By the good keywords I mean that those keywords which are often search on their search engine. So if you put those keywords on your site then search engine will give you a ranking for that because your site has that information what people are looking for.

One important thing that is please don’t user one keyword for every search engine because every search engine has a set of rules to give ranking, so one keyword is important for one engine may be it is not good for others.

There in one keyword tool I strongly recommend (www.keywordfindertool.com) that is coming very soon, by that you can search keywords for every search engine… this is the solution for the above problem.

keywords
keyword billing
keyword density

I’ve been following a discussion over at the SEOChat Forums about an experiment with meta tags that, while far from conclusive, is demonstrating a situation where meta tags don’t matter, at least where search engine optimization is concerned.

Meta Tags are most commonly used to distinguish the keywords that are relevant to a page’s content. They are placed in between the

tags and look like this:

< meta name="keywords" content="entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, business, marketing, etc"/ >

If you do a "view source" command from your browser (right click on a webpage in the Internet Explorer browser) and look at the code you may find the above tag at the top, full of keywords relevant to the page you are looking at.

In the early days of pre-Google search meta tag keywords were reasonably powerful tools for search engine optimization, and combined with the keywords within a page made up the main driving forces that dictated how high up a page would show up in search results. Back then the search engines were quite primitive by today’s standards and often you would have companies paying the prominent search engines to make sure their websites showed up high in results for certain keywords. Google of course equalized the playing field somewhat but the legacy of meta tags lives on and you will see countless articles still instructing webmasters of the importance of meta tag keywords. This quite frankly, is dated information.

The reality nowadays is that meta tag keywords are considered far from crucial for good SEO and if abused can even be bad for it. The argument circling around SEO circles is that meta keywords are akin to keyword stuffing, a "black hat" SEO technique where websites are "stuffed" full of keywords and hidden, either with code or by using a text color the same as the background color. Of course this is frowned upon and if found out the website will be banned from Google. Meta keywords, while not quite as insidious as keyword stuffing, is similar in the sense that keywords are "stuffed" into the code of a page, hence search engines do not give much, if any weighting to them. Most of the major search engines ignore them altogether.

Should you be using meta tag keywords at all?

Yes and no. It definitely should not be prioritized and if you have other, better SEO things to do worry about don’t spend time on your meta keywords. If you insist on using meta keywords use them sparingly, only a handful, about 10 maximum, and keep them very relevant to the page content. Less is more in this case.

Meta keywords are a legacy of web 1.0 and are slowly being phased out completely. Your title tags, heading tags and content play a much more important role and really if you have time to spare to work on SEO you should be writing great new content that people will link to, not cramming your pages with redundant keywords.

By Yaro Starak
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Are you interested in online marketing, Internet business, blogs and podcasts? Are you sick of "gurus" trying to sell you the latest get rich quick online deal?

Get educated, it’s the key to real online wealth.

If you like quality education written in a friendly style by an individual making a living online independently just like you then visit my blog - Entrepreneur’s Journey.

In today’s market, it’s crucial for every marketer to track keyword response rates. It’s simply the only way of tracking advertising results and knowing which of your keywords are working for you.

In the online marketing world, it’s just as important to track your ad results. Knowing the exact response rate to your advertisement lets you to figure out how well it performed, which can help increase your profits and lower your costs.

Don’t be afraid to change a poorly responding advertisement to try to make it work better. Pay attention to headlines, ad copy, graphics and layout, and then be sure to re-test the ad. You might also find that where your sites are running is the problem – try alternative systems. By the same token, you should test your keywords to make sure that they will work the way you want them to. They’re very similar to advertisements in that they either work brilliantly or not at all.

Tracking your ad results allows you to be sure that your ad publisher has followed through on their end of the bargain, and the information you gather allows you to prepare better campaigns the next time. The best way to track online ad results is to measure click-through rates (the number of people who clicked on your advertisement). There are other measurements such as conversion ratio (the number of people who click through and buy), but measuring click-through is a fine way to get started. There are two methods of tracking click through rates mentioned below:

CGI Scripts.

You can download CGI scripts at plenty of websites, and you can place CGI scripts in your CGI directory if your web host supports it. Try to find a small but powerful CGI script that tracks clicks on your site – do it invisibly, so your visitors don’t know you’re tracking them. LinkinLite is one free CGI script you could try, as an example, or you could have one made specially for you. Getting a custom script can be great, as long as you don’t pay too much for it.

PHP and ASP Scripts

Some CGI scripts are better than others. Basically, CGI seems to be dieing slowly but surely. It is being replaced by ASP and PHP both of which have scripts available to perform these actions. PHP is emerging as the preferred language for server side scripting and is therefore the most accessible of the group. Depending on what your hosting service offers you should be able to find free tracking software simply by Googling for the software in the particular scripting language that you need. If you are unsure as to whether your hosting service allows a particular server-side scripting language, don’t hesitate to ask. Most of these providers want all of their services used otherwise they feel as though they have wasted time and/or money implementing the service.

Online Tracking Services.

Online tracking services count click-throughs using own servers. This is usually free, although most require you to upgrade to paid versions before they’ll let you do anything useful with the statistics. The upgrades are worth while, but you should try out the free version before upgrading to make sure that you are comfortable with the user interface. Once you’ve decided on a software to use, shop around. See if there is a similar interface on something cheaper. Your money can go really far on the internet, and if you’re lucky you can take advantage of special offers.

If you’re interested in a free online click-tracking service, try Hypertracker, Statmuncher, Adminder or Roibot. These services are all relatively straightforward. They are all pretty much equal in quality. The differences between these free services are more or less personal preference. But remember, a comfortable user interface goes a long ways. If you don’t like the look and feel of the program, you won’t enjoy using it and will eventually stop using it all together.

Banner ad click-through rates are usually between 0.5% and 5%, although for e-zines it can go as high as 10%. That’s about average compared to offline marketing methods, which average roughly 2%.

If you provide a service to a niche market, you are more likely to see higher click through rates. Professionals in the area of online marketing often settle for no less than a 7% click through rate. These rates can be done and should certainly be shot for.

Regardless of which tracking methods you use, you need to be tracking your keywords and advertising results somehow – it’s essential, and it takes you a step further in the SEO marketplace. Every set of statistics lets you get to know your site’s market position better and better, and gets you one step closer to where you want to be.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Search engines love content. Graphics may make your site look great, but a nice picture does not attract a search engine. Or a searcher for that matter. Good, relevant content does.

Search engines aren’t all that different from people. When faced with a ton of choices, they want to know which sites are the best. And, the best sites are the ones that give the most accurate and relevant information.

Good content serves three main purposes:

1. Search engines will rank your site higher for keywords and phrases included within your content.

2. Users will return to your site, and recommend it to others

3. Other sites will link to you, which will improve your linking popularity and make your web site visible to the spiders.

But, how do you get good content? Simple. You write it, or get someone else to write it for you, using keywords and phrases your visitors will actually use on a search query.

Feeling a little hot under the collar? Relax. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Anyone can learn to write for crawler search engines. It just takes a little planning, detective work and focus. Ready to begin? Follow the steps below and you’ll be writing like a pro in no time.

1. Determine which keywords and phrases you want to target

Before you sit down to write anything, you’ll need to decide which keywords and keyphrases are relevant to your site. One of the best ways to do this is to use the Word Tracker keyword tracking service at www.wordtracker.com. Word Tracker receives its data from the Dogpile and Metacrawler search engines and estimates search counts for all other search engines based on its market share. You can sign up for a day, a week, a month or a year.

Another good way to find keywords your visitors are using is to look at your site’s server logs. These will tell you what phrases people are using to find your site. Some keywords will be too competitive. For example, the keywords "real estate" will return hundreds, if not thousands of search results, and may not place your site near the top, but "Houston Real Estate" or is more focused and targeted to a particular query.

If you want your site to be included in local and regional searches you may want to design your site with local searches in mind, even if you also market globally. How do you do this? Just include local keywords such as address, city, state, province and zip code in the header or footer of your web pages. For example:

XYZ Business Consultant, 3657 Acacia Avenue, Santa Cruz, California 95067. Tel: 408 746 8954. Located close to San Jose, CA.

That way you have a much better chance of getting a first page listing on a localized search.

2. Scatter your chosen keywords and phrases throughout your text.

Let’s say one of the keyphrases you want to target is "cotton duvets". You’ll want to weave this phrase throughout your copy without making it sound stilted or contrived. Remember, you still need to persuade your prospects to buy your product, so don’t be tempted to write paragraphs like this:

"Our cotton duvets are the softest cotton duvets around. Check out our affordable cotton duvets in our online cotton duvet store now." While it’s obvious what your keyphrases are, the two sentences don’t exactly encourage your visitor to place an order. Be subtle. Use your keywords to emphasize your point and insert them where they naturally fit, without compromising flow and readability.

3. Review your headings, titles and hyperlinks

Use your keywords in headings, subtitles, page titles (found in the blue bar at the top of your Web browser), bold face and hyperlinks, because these stand out to the search engines. For example, returning to the cotton duvets you may want to change your "contact us" hyperlink to "contact us now about our luxurious cotton duvets." Or, "learn more about how our cotton duvets can keep you warm and snug this winter"

4. Post keyphrase-rich, informative articles on your site

Another great way to fill your site up with keyword-laden content is to post relevant, informative articles. Every article you post on your site adds more content–content that the search engines thrive on. And, if you write each article as if you are giving the spider a good, healthy meal full of essential keywords, they’ll devour every word, and index it for future use.

You can also post your articles on article directories such as GoArticles, Article City or IdeaMarketers that offer free content to ezine publishers and website owners. That way you’ll spread the word about your site, get some great back links and even free publicity.

5. Publish a Newsletter or Ezine

Newsletters and ezines are another way to add content to your site. If you’ve written articles already, you get to reuse them, and you can create a newsletter archive section on your website.

6. Post a blog or weblog

Blogs or Weblogs are frequently updated journals. that point to articles elsewhere on the web, and to existing on-site articles. The popularity of blogs have spawned blog services such as Typepad and Blogger which make it easy for non-techies to update their sites and add them to an existing web site. Because both the search engines and your site’s visitor’s love new, updated information, blogs can be a great way of adding content to your site on a daily basis. You can use a blog to announce company news or comment on industry news, announce new product details or to create a "brand" or "personality" for your company.

Before you begin publishing your blog, think about what you’re customers want to know. Then, answer their questions on a daily basis. It won’t be long before you’ll have them, and the search engines hooked.

About The Author

Julia is an independent copywriter specializing in advertising and search engine marketing services. To learn more about how Julia can help boost your company’s profits visit her site at www.juliahyde.com. You may also like to sign up for Marketing Works! Julia’s monthly ezine. Visit www.juliahyde.com/form.html or email Julia for details.

info@juliahyde.com

Many SEO experts will tell you that they have specific ways of choosing the right keywords for a website. Some do it using SEO tools – software that compares possible keywords to see which are used the most. Some will give you DIY methods with spreadsheets. We say, however, that you should try every method you can in the search for keywords. Here are some steps that might help:

Identify and create a list of keywords from meta tags, research on your competitors, your highest-converting products and biggest current traffic sources. For each term (typically between 30 and 50 terms overall), narrow the field down to about 15 or 20, choosing the terms you feel are most relevant to your website. Your higher ranked competitors are probably up there for a reason so take a look at what they are providing. Make sure that everything is directly relevant and try to stretch yourself out into some unchartered water. The less common that your key words are, the more likely you are to get the search engine results for these key words.

We would recommend a piece of software called WordTracker to find out how many searches have been done on a certain term. You can choose to work with this information however you want – spreadsheets are good, but you can use anything that will make it easy reasonably easy for you to track these keywords. You’re trying to find a popular word that has a low competition rate. Although this is easier said than done, it’s very rewarding to find an area where your site can succeed because of the lack of competition. You should remember, though, that these search databases are relatively small, and should be used for comparing keywords against one another rather than for estimating their true ‘market sizes’.

This keyword selection research should then be compared with client experience of which keywords may be most profitably optimized, as well as any current ranking on the target keywords. Data from PPC campaigns can be helpful for this. The outcome should be a focused list of, say, 15-20 keywords that are both strong performers in terms of search volume, as well as solid candidates for successful optimization.

When determining how profitable your key words are you should look into your web sites statistics and see what key words were used for what number of sales. This is called your conversion rate. The more sales that are associated with a certain key word, the more valuable that key word is. It is important to account for all of the variables, however. If ten people come across your site through a certain key word but only one of them buys an item this key word isn’t as profitable as a key word that one person finds your site through and still orders a product. It is important to work percentages into your decision of worth of a key word. Your “conversion rate” is the number of sales divided by the number of visitors.

You probably know who your competitors are, so go to their site and open the source code of a few of their pages (select ‘View Source’ from your browser’s menu). Look for the tag to see which keywords they’re aiming for. Their keywords are often garbage, but if you look around at a few sites then you can often find keywords you hadn’t thought of. It is not good practice to simply copy and paste a list of key words. It would even be concievable that you would be charged with copyright infringement for such activities. Whether or not you get charged, it is morally wrong. Looking through and coming across a few extra relevant key words is one thing. Steeling an entire list is something else completely.

Another approach is to type in the keywords you have in mind and look at the current top results. Analyze their pages for keywords, descriptions and content – this will give you some idea of what kind of keyword density you should be looking at for your keywords. If the sites that come up are a different kind of business to you altogether then you’ve probably chosen a dodgy keyword – remember that you’re trying to get relevant traffic, not just any traffic.

The general rules that you need to keep in mind when selecting key words are:

1. Try to select unique key words that your competitors have not thought of.

2. Optimize for your most profitable key words. How many sales does the key word generate? How much profit is made for each of these sales?

3. Make sure that the key words are very relevant to your site so that people who find your site through your key words will not immediately leave.

4. Try to assemble a list of key words that covers your site very will so that you aren’t leaving anyone or anything out.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Have you ever got one of those silly emails that offers to let you own a keyword? Silly question. How many such emails do you get every day?

A number of such services regularly email me offering keyword ownership of premium keywords for $300/year. They say that anyone can type the keyword I bought in the address bar of Internet explorer, instead of typing in a URL, and they will be sent directly to my site. In total it seems that there are about 2% of Internet users worldwide who have enabled one type or another of this system, spread out between a few competitive services.

Data shows that between 4% and 7% of search queries are performed by entering something in the address bar. By default for IE users, these searches are automatically routed through to MSN search. Many of us however have installed so much software over time, and unknowingly, some of this software has re-routed these search queries to other search portals, such as iGetNet, or others. This often happens if you’ve installed any file sharing software. We have all heard / read about how many extra ‘features’ come with programs like Kazaa. This means that your default search from the address bar may no longer be MSN, and may have been rerouted elsewhere, but the basic principle still applies. Of the queries that are actually run from an address bar, at least half of them are unintentionally instigated by people mistyping the desired URL. This means that between 2% and 4% of Internet users actually search via their address bar.

So how exactly do these address bars work? There are many of these companies offering this kind of service, with each one of them selling the very same keywords to different and sometimes competing companies. To make things worse, the keywords you might buy will only work with the issuing companys proprietary address bar plug-in. Then, to actually offer search capabilities from the address bar, each of these service providers needs to get individual Internet users to download and install their plug-in, and remember to run searches from the address bar.

How effective can a marketing strategy of this nature be when the various tools are not interchangeable, there are numerous competitors selling the same key words to different companies, and you are targeting only a small fraction of Internet users? If your ad is being displayed because its similar to the search query, are you paying for irrelevant results? This can happen; If there is not a perfect match to a search query, the next closest match may be displayed.

Competing with these companies is any search engine that offers its own toolbar. You can download a toolbar from any number of engines, and run searches on any key word or phrase quickly and easily. You then get the search engines selection of closest matches, from all the web sites they have indexed. They offer more than just one choice, and dont cost anything

Who Started This?

Started in 1998, Realnames was the first company that tied searching via the address bar to a web browser. At the time, it was touted as a value added solution for businesses around the world who were attempting to get their products found quickly, but didn’t want customers to have to wade through a sea of Web addresses to reach their destination.

In part, it was deemed necessary because so few web site operators were search engine savvy, and fewer still knew anything about search engine optimization and promotion. What the Realnames solution did was allow a web site operator to buy a keyword, and then when any user of Internet Explorer would type that keyword into the IE address toolbar, they would get directed to the web site that owned the keyword.

The company hoped to profit from businesses which wanted to reach Internet users who would type keywords into their browsers address bar instead of remembering the url, or going through a standard search interface.

Unfortunately for the company, the service was entirely dependent on Microsoft; and when Microsoft stopped supporting the technology in May 2002, the company was forced to close. The reason it was so totally dependent was simple; Unlike the new companies on the market today, Realnames did not depend on an end user downloading and installing a plugin, instead it was essentially integrated into Internet Explorer by Microsoft. Therefore everyone who used IE automatically had the plugin.

The Legal Question

Each of the companies offering these services has a policy designed to ensure that a web site only buys keywords related to their content, and their review process is designed to keep cybersquatters from hijacking popular names and products. Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee that any one of these keyword ownership services adheres to any naming standard, or even ensures that any purchaser has the legal right to any of the terms they are buying. This means that the rights to copyrighted material like "Pepsi" or generic words like "business" could end up in the hands of the first buyer. While Pepsi is a well known brand name, there are millions of copyrighted and trademark protected terms, covered in multiple jurisdictions. It would not be cost effective or practical for these services to police copyright and trademark infringement.

In the summer of 1999, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, denied Playboy’s request for an injunction barring a search engine from selling advertising based on the terms playboy and playmate. In the precedent setting ruling regarding keyword advertising, Judge Stotler of the United States District Court in Santa, Ana, California, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Playboy Enterprises against the search engine Excite, Inc. and Netscape. The ruling limited the online rights of trademark holders, as it recognized that a trademark may be used without authorization by search engines in advertising sales practices.

Playboy claimed that the search engines were displaying paid banner ads from pornographic web sites whenever "playboy" or "playmate" were used as a search term. As the owner of the trademarks for both terms, Playboy argued that the use of its trademarks for a third party sales scheme was trademark infringement and branding dilution.

In the ruling dismissing Playboy’s case, the Judge found that Excite had not used the trademarks "playboy" and "playmate" in an unlawful manner. This was because Excite had not used the trademarked words to identify Excites own goods or services and therefore trademark infringement laws did not apply. It was further determined that even if there was trademark usage, there was no infringement because there was no evidence that consumers confused Playboy products with the services of Excite or Netscape.

What about within Meta Tags?

Is it illegal to use trademarked terms in your meta tags? Sometimes. The problem occurs with how and why you are using the terms. Web sites that use the tags in a deceptive manner have lost legal battles. However, legitimate reasons to use the terms have resulted in successful defenses.

In a case involving Playboy, the firm was able to prove trademark infringement, based on use of their trademark in meta tags, url and content on the web site. The case was filed by the firm against web site operators for stuffing their web pages with the words Playboyand Playmatehundreds of times. Furthermore, the defendants were also using the terms Playboy and Playmate in the site names, URLs, and slogans. In this case the Judge ruled for Playboy, as there was a clear case of trademark infringement.

In the separate case, Playboy vs. Terri Welles, the court refused Playboy’s request. The reason was simple. Terri Welles was Playboy’s 1981 Playmate of the Year. She had used the terms "Playmate" and "Playboy" on her web pages and within her meta tags, and the Court felt she had a legitimate right to use them to accurately describe herself, and to ensure that the search engines could catalog her web site properly within their databases. Playboy’s appeal was dismissed on Feb. 1, 2002.

In Summary

It is clear that if you have a legitimate reason to use a trademarked word or phrase in your web site you can. You may also rent their ownership from one of the keyword ownership companies. Be careful, though, it is possible that may get sued.

Does the technology work? Yes, but only for some of the approximately 3% of Internet users worldwide who have installed any one of a variety of competing plugins that enable this type of searching. I stress a fraction of the 3%, as you would need to buy the keywords from each individual vendor to ensure reaching all 2%.

About The Author

Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software, www.metamend.com, a Victoria B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software is recognized as the world leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firm’s business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geo-locational, or GIS, along with their phraseology technology and context sensitive search technologies.

articles@metamend.com

We all want to know how keywords affect our rankings, but to find out we’ll need to do a little work. Many say keywords are the key to good search engine rankings, although they aren’t at all the only factor.

If you need a tool to help you decide on your keywords, try Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool – it allows you to test your keyword rankings by showing you statistics on recent searches for them. It’s a great tool when you have no clue which keyword you should choose, as it can give you a list of terms that were recently searched on.

Keyword Density.

Keyword density refers to the number of the keywords contained within your text relative to the amount of text there is. Preferred keyword density ratios vary between search engines, but you should generally try to keep them between two and eight percent (major search engines prefer the lower end). Keyword analysis tools can help to optimize a web page’s keyword density. These tools are good if you’re not sure of what you’re doing, as they’re very intuitive and explain things as you go.

Counting the Keywords.

Many SEO experts will tell you that the keyword density of your text isn’t a very important factor, and that you should be careful not to overdo it. So is there a limit? How many times should you use your keywords? SEO experts won’t be able to answer these questions for you, because no-one’s really sure of the answer. The best answer is that it changes regularly, and you can never be sure – you have to experiment to see what works for you.

Location of Keywords.

When testing the effects of keyword location, we found that pages with the keywords at the top and bottom of the page ranked higher on Google than pages with the keywords in the middle.

Many other search engines also give keywords more or less weight based on their location, but keep in mind that each search engine’s algorithm is different. Here’s a list of how most search engines prioritize keyword positions, from most to least:

1. Domain name.

2. Page title.

3. Headings (i.e. H1, H2, etc.).

4. Body text (the first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more).

5. Meta tags (especially description).

6. Links (including keywords in the URL or link text of links to you).

7. Alt text (the ‘alt’ descriptions for your pictures).

Really, though, keyword density is one of those areas where you’ll have trouble on your hands if you try to second guess the search engines. Be cautious.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

What can you do if your keywords are too common? Is there anything that can help?

Well, for a start, including misspellings in your meta tag keywords could help you to get visitors who don’t know how to spell or those who type too fast – this traffic is just as good as any other, after all. How many people do you know that use a dictionary when they don’t know how to spell a word? I certainly can’t think of many. Including misspellings will help you to some extent, but it probably will not provide you with a drastic improvement in traffic especially considering that many search engines now have built in spell checkers so that if a user spells a word incorrectly it asks “Did you mean ?” You can use tools like WordTracker to find out which misspellings are the most popular, and target those.

Try to think on the same level as your users, not always like a webmaster. Thinking like the average person will make you more successful – you should constantly remind yourself to think like the average person when you’re trying to pick what words people will use to find you. If you can get into the mind set of a lay person and think “What would I type into the search box if I was looking for the content on this web page?” You probably come up with the key words that are most important. Think of each group within your audience and try to come up with realistic search queries. Entering each word from these queries into your meta tags should help you substantially in terms of increased search engine traffic.

One of the things that will set you apart from the rest of the world is learning the special language of your trade. When you learn about your chosen trade, you start using acronyms and other words that would be foreign to most people, but mean something to the people who would be searching for you. Words that people outside your industry would search for aren’t the same as ones that people inside it would search for – targeting jargon words can help you to get highly-targeted traffic with little competition.

Another thing that will set you apart is using words that someone unfamiliar with your trade would use in an attempt to find content regarding your trade. You can’t target your site only to those who already know a good deal about what you have to offer. Your content probably won’t be fresh to people who are experienced in your field so you are much more dependent on your products at that point. If, however, you are able to target people who know little or nothing about your particular trade, you will be able to generate a good deal of traffic and probably move a sizable amount of inventory.

One last, but very important, method of providing good key word is to discuss the subject of your site with others and observe their reactions to your language. If they seem to suddenly understand what you are saying, that phrase may be a good one for your key words. Talk to your friends, your family, and other web masters about your subject and see what language is generally associated with your subject. This language is generally the correct language to use when generating your key words.

The most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to come up with unique key words is that there are huge groups of people out there who are interested in your goods but have not been targeted by other sites. These markets (known as niche markets) are basically ripe for the picking. If you can come up with a group that would be interested in your product but has not been targeted thoroughly by your competition, you will be able to drastically increase your traffic and/or sales. The ability to identify and target niche markets is an art and it can be developed by any truly dedicated marketer, but you have to be observant and patient in order to come up with valuable niche markets. After all, you are attempting to do what nobody has done before!

As an SEO, you will constantly be fighting with your key words. You will be trying to come up with more interesting or unique key words, and you will be trying to implement them more smoothly into your web page. The fact of the matter is that this takes time and practice. You have to get thoroughly engrossed in the community surrounding your market. Check out some forums relating to your market, look at the common forms of media coverage such as magazines and books. There are possible key words everywhere just waiting to be exploited for the sake of increases in your traffic and sales.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Choosing keywords is one of the most important things when optimizing a website. Put yourself into the position of your customers, what kind of search terms would you use to find the products you sell or services you offer on the internet? You can also use special kind of software, that will tell you, what the most searched keyword has been last month. Another strategy is to log in at Google AdWords some people call it PPC, or Pay Per Click. You can search there for different kind of keywords. So this will give you a good idea, what kind of keywords or search terms you should use or should not use, to promote your website and online project.

If you use a keyword (phrase) or term that’s very common, it’s hard to get a good ranking in search engines. This is caused by the huge competition you face. We are talking here about our own experience. Example would be: if we optimize one of our web pages for the search term SEO it would be too difficult to come up on the first place, but if we would use SEO Company or SEO Services, we have a good chance to come up in the first three pages or one of de first 30 search results of Google, Yahoo or MSN.

When making a decision to use SEO services, it’s clear that it is an investment for your E-business or Company web site, but keep one very important fact in mind, that your web site will not achieve good ranking results in two weeks. We had a few cases that it took us months to achieve a good ranking in all the search engines and databases.

Every search engine optimization Company has to “do their homework” before plunging into a new projects. And when doing so, bear in mind that search engine optimization and keyword research is essential if you want to meet your goals.

Look that the seo firm will discuss with you your short-term and long-term goals; design a strategy best suited for you; and then formulate a detailed implementation program, including optimization, strategy and online marketing.

Copyright © 2002-2005 SEO-WATCH. http://www.seo-watch.com All Rights Reserved

Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including all information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.seo-watch.com when using this article in newsletters or online.