Picking the Right Keywords

I received an e-mail from someone the other day that they were ranked #1 in two search engines under the keyword phrase "death insurance". "Wow," I told him, "that's great." I suppose I didn't want to hurt his feelings. It's relatively easy to pick a set of rarely used keywords and get them highly ranked. There's no competition. But then again, you won't get many hits on your website that way, either.

Search engine placement is key to seeing good results from your website. But don't go overboard wasting your time using obscure keywords. Here are some suggestions about making your keyword list.

Sit down and make a list of the products or services your site sells. If you're not selling anything, fine... make a list of the reasons why people would want to visit your site. The trick here is to imagine your customer/visitor and what they are looking for.

A good resource to come up with relevent keywords you may never think of your self is JimTools.com. They have a really cool online application that will come up with keywords relevent to a phrase you type in.

Now take each item on your list and come up with synonyms and misspelled versions of those keywords and phrases.

You should have a pretty long list by now. Let's make it even longer. For verbs in your list, come up with past/present tenses and list them. For nouns in your list, come up with pluralized versions and list them.

Your list should have tripled in size by now. We're almost there. Now take the words in your list and capitalize the first letter and add those to your list.

You now have a list of every conceivable keyword someone interested in what you have to offer might type into the search box of a search engine. Now what?

Pare it down a little. You are going to use these keywords to create entrance pages (bridge pages) that are designed solely to rank highly in search engines. These days, many search engines limit the number of submissions from one domain. So if your keyword list is TOO long, you'll run into trouble. Take out the words/phrases that you don't think someone will search for.

This goes against the common advice that "promotion gurus" are spouting off these days, but keep this in mind: come up with too many keywords and you'll spend ALL your time creating entrance pages and submitting them, tweaking them, checking their stats, etc. After all, web promotion isn't all glamorous brainstorming... some of it is hard work, too.

Dan Kramer
KloakIt

Download KloakItNow!