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Choosing The Best Terms To Drive Traffic To Your Site

By: Bob Sherman

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If you are like your neighbor who owns a web site, you would like your site to emerge in the top ten of Google search results. Regrettably, most people don't possess the knowledge to actually achieve this goal. There are definite steps you must take in order to be found for terms related to your site. Moreover, taking your time to investigate the best possible keywords for your web site is an important step on the ladder.

Many webmasters make the slip-up of assuming that a ranking for one generic term related to their website will turn their site into a profitable success. Although that one generic term can provide a good flow of traffic and brand appreciation, this doesn’t mean the traffic will be targeted traffic that will make purchases or become opt in subscribers. Not only that, but the costs of targeting that term will likely outstrip your return on investment. You should target multiple keywords correlated to the benefits of your product or the problems your product solves. This will not only drive traffic, but also result in a significant amount of conversion.

First of all you need to consider who your prospects are and the benefits they will receive for visiting your site. Do you sell products online? Do you suggest services? Is your website more information focused? What would visitors see as their benefit for coming to your site? Once you understand your potential visitors and why they will come to your site you will be able to use your time more wisely in selecting keywords.

With that as a goal, you can now consider the benefit or problem related terms that you think people will use in searches to find your web site. You ought not to be content with just one term. This is a snare that many webmasters fall into when they assume that a single keyword will produce sufficient traffic to maintain their business. And they are stunned that their business doesn’t improve if they do attain that ranking. Think about all of the possible keywords and themes of your web site, even use a thesaurus to locate related terms. You can also examine competitor websites for ideas. It can be surprising just what terms your potential visitors will be using!

Once you have put together the list of keywords, you'll need to check some web resources to estimate how widely used and competitive those keywords are. And, you'll start to polish those terms to be more targeted to your site’s purpose.

To start out you'll find out how widely used your keywords are. This step can be performed using a variety of keyword suggestion tools.

Keyword suggestion tools inform you which words and phrases were typed into searches, and how many searches were conducted on those keywords. Entering a phrase in the resource will result in a range of other keywords that include your keyword, alternative phrases with a similar theme and also an estimate of the magnitude of traffic each expression produces per month. These tools can be inconsistent as they query different search engines and the traffic estimations can be imprecise, but they are still helpful for trying to get a ball park estimation of the number of searches conducted, and for suggesting several words and phrases you may never have thought of targeting.

Google's AdWords Keyword Tool, located at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is free to use and provides a list of suggested terms as well as the amount of searches conducted on Google.

A similar tool is located at http://www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the metacrawlers Dogpile and Metacrawler. So the statistics might not be illustrative of what's being searched on the web as a whole. But Wordtracker is still good for offering alternative phrases and associated phrases. Wordtracker has a subscription service. Wordtracker offers monthly or annual subscriptions.

Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com is a relative newcomer to the keyword suggestion market. KeywordDiscovery can query over 200 search engines world wide and produces comparable results to Wordtracker as well as other services, but with prices starting at $69.95 per month. You can sample this resource at no charge but you'll receive only a subset of the results you would get as a paid member.

The next step in picking the best terms is checking how competitive they are. Ideally you want to find terms that have lots of traffic but few websites competing to excel for that keyword. You can use a number of tricks to estimate this. Competitive pages that are optimized for a term will certainly have that keyword in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site. So by going to Google and using the queries intitle:“phrase here” and inanchor:“phrase here”, you can find how many other pages have been optimized for your preferred phrase. The lower the number for these searches, the less competition there is for the term. For more content about what these Google advanced search operators do, visit http://google.about.com/od/googlepowersearches/Google_Power_Searches.htm.

Using these tools should have now provided you with a list of terms that are a lot more targeted than your earliest keywords. These phrases can include breaking your term down by geographical location, or a precise product. You should now be able to optimize your web site for several keywords - remember that search engines index each of your pages and not only websites. That means all of your pages in your web site can be found in search engines, which in turn means each of your pages can be optimized for distinctive keywords!

You may also want to consider the “long tail” search phrases. These are obscure multi word phrases that are use infrequently in searches, but are so precise they can end up being very targeted terms and carry with them higher conversion rates. In order to include long tails phrases you must have a information rich site - the more content you have the more opportunities you have to include little used phrases that can be found in your copy.

So you should now finally have a list of the most effective targeted phrases for your web site! As you can see, the practice of selecting your terms in not something that should be considered quickly. There is considerable preparation to do if you seek to maximize the ability of your website to attract organic search traffic. With your final list you will now be ready to rework your pages to be found for those terms, but that is a further topic.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

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