How to select a proper keyword for a website?

Hi,

Yes, indeed. Get this book: Search Engine Optimization - An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin. It's all you need to beat you competition.

Of course, you don't set up SEO on your Web site. It's the things you do to attract targeted traffic to your Web site.

Search engines look for lots of quality content, lots of pages with relevant and interesting content - information that visitors find interesting and helpful.

Visitors are not looking for your Web site. They seek information via keywords entered in a search engine like Google.

Keyword analysis is the first step in SEO. Google can help you with that.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is an excellent preliminary brainstorming tool. Let's say that you have ten ideas for a theme or Site Concept. This tool gives you a superb "high level snapshot" of how profitable each of your Site Concept possibilities might be. Here's the URL: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - remember, it's free.

Many people new to Web site creation believe that you just create a Web site and they will come. Like the baseball movie, Field of Dreams (1989), where Kevin Costner creates a baseball field in the middle of nowhere and soon thousands are flocking to the field.

This only happens in the movies, not in real life.

You must attract the search engines(SEs). The most cost effective way to do that is by creating lots of Web pages with quality, relevant content (information) that matches user's needs and requirements for information..

Potential visitors do not look for a web site per se. They do not enter your Web Address. They are looking for information. They do not enter your Web site URL into an SE. They enter keywords or phrases into the SE and the SE responds with millions of Web sites in many cases and then the surfer may make his keyword more relevant and try again. Most surfers only look at the first few pages even though there may be millions of hits on a particular keyword.

So the first thing you must do is to brainstorm you keywords - which keywords are relevant to the theme of your Web site.

But this is not enough. Remember the concept of supply and demand?

Let me explain. If there is a low supply of something, say a commodity like coffee, that means that there is not much available. What happens if many people all want a lot of coffee. That creates a big demand for coffee, but when they go to buy coffee the price has gone up. It went up because the demand exceeded the supply. This causes the coffee growers to grow more coffee. They grow too much and there is a big supply, so the price drops because the demand has dropped owing to the increase in the supplies of coffee.

The same concept can be applied to keywords or phrases. Really scarce keywords with hardly any supply related to your Web site theme.

How do you find those keywords that have a huge demand and very little supply?

Aye, that's the rub.

One of the ways to do this without spending any money is to use Google's AdWord tool: (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

This tool is actually intended to help advertisers decide which keywords to buy. It provides Demand (they call it "Search Volume") and "Advertiser Competition" (another kind of Demand for your keywords!). This tool even provides the "monetary value" (optional) of your keywords (i.e., what advertisers can expect to pay).

So what do you (a publisher (a Web site builder), not an advertiser) look for? Remember this for now...

* the more relevant keywords that are generated by this tool,

* the greater the Demand ("Search Volume") for the keywords,

* the greater the "Advertiser Competition", and

* the more the keywords cost advertisers...

... the better for you!

Just go through the tutorials that Google has to offer.

The other tool for keywords is Wordtracker - it is not free, but is the best on the Web for analyzing keyword demand and supply: (http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html). Try their free trial. I entered "free keyword analysis" into Google and got 11 million hits so you know it's a hot topic.

Once you know what your keywords are, they form the basis of creating Web pages for your Web site. You sprinkle relevant keywords throughout your Web page. These will attract the SEs and if you have enough pages, you will rise up through the ranks and hopefully achieve a listing on the first page of the SEs.

The SEs use software called "spiders". The spiders job is to crawl the entire universe of Web sites and index them by keyword. The database index is why they can return an answer so fast because there are now a billion Web sites or so and still growing fast.

You keep adding pages to your Web site - the more pages the better. That's why the phrase, "Content is King!" came about. The SEs love lots of high quality content.

That's also why most 5 - 10 page Web sites attract no targeted traffic. The SEs just ignore them.

No content, no crawlers for you...bad dog.

However, all is not lost because once you get to about 30 pages, the SEs begin to take notice. When you reach 50 pages, you may see a page ranked number one in an SE, but don't stop there. Keep adding pages - just one a day would mount up to 365 in one year.

Now, where do you find software that can build your Web site. Here is one that is free and it's a lot like Microsoft's Front Page. These are sometimes called WYSIWYG editors, pronounced "wizeewhig" and means "What You See Is What You Get". Another more expensive editor is Macromedia's Dreamweaver, but this costs several hundred dollars. These are designed for the Geeks of the world.

The Web site for the free WYSIWYG is: (http://www.nvu.com/index.php). NVU; pronounced "New View". There are free tutorial there. More tutorials can be found by entering "free nvu tutorials" in Google.

You may want to try GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). This is a free graphics editor that rivals best of breed Adobe Photoshop. There are free tutorials for GIMP, too here: (http://www.designyourownweb.com/gimp-tutorial.htm).

It's a good idea to have some pictures and graphics on your Web pages to tantalize your visitors. . Not too many, though, because the search engines only recognize text. The ignore the pictures and graphics.

We now have to get recognized by the SEs. If you have enough high quality content and are patient, eventually the SEs will discover you. Impatient people use something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Internet Marketing. Here is a new book that does just that: "Search Engine Optimization - An Hour A Day" by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin.

Then, there is Brad Tabke's "26 steps to 15K a day". It boils down to solid content thoughtfully put together can make more impact than a decade's worth of tweaks that may or may not work such as fiddling with META tags. Find his 26 steps here: (http://www.frihost.com/forums/vt-2797.html).

This is the exact same plan used by Site Build It. See Ken's blog: ( http://blogit.sitesell.com/waltera1.html). I'm not saying Brad stole it from Ken Evoy, but Ken developed what is known as the C + T + P + M formula.

This is how the formula works:
Create in-demand content (information) - C
Attract Targeted Traffic (visitors) - T
Presell Those Visitors - P
Monitize Presold Traffic - M

Content
Web users search for information, for solutions. They are not looking for you - they don't even know you (yet!). They seek what you know. Give it to them. Convert your knowledge into in-demand Content. (http://ctpm.sitesell.com/waltera1.html) To succeed online, start where they start - at "the search."

Traffic
Your topical content ranks high at the Search Engines (ex., Google, Yahoo!, MSN), attracting free, targeted (i.e., interested), open-to-you visitors. Basically, these future customers "meet you" at your site. These visitors are known as "Traffic.".

PREsell
Complete strangers develop trust and confidence in you. Why? You "PREsell" by OVERdelivering what they seek... relevant, original, information.

Deliver it in your own voice, in your own way. Go beyond merely instilling confidence... your visitors will like you.

Monetize
Convert warm, willing-to-buy ("PREsold") visitors into income. Called "Monetizing," this is the easy part. But "M" cannot happen if you fail to first execute C T P. This is where 99% of small businesses fail.

Brad also created and runs one of the best forums for Web site building information at: (http://www.webmasterworld.com/).

Get this book about Google: Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest. Some of the hacks are written in perl. I do perl, but there are other hacks which don't require it.

So hack away. And don't forget to check out Brett Tabke's "26 Steps to 15K a Day".

Kindest Personal Regards,

Walt Brown
Site Build It Certified Webmaster
http://results.sitesell.com/waltera1.html
capecod1@capecod-beaches.com

P.S. Finally, get this book: "Spidering Hacks - 100 Industrial strength Tips and Tools" by Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain.