Attracting and Keeping Clients with Keywords

With SEO planning, it is all about the keywords. Some keywords are very popular and it would be a mistake to load up your website only with relevant popular search words and terms. Let’s talk about what I mean by popular. SEO keywords can be put into two categories:

1. Words that are searched for
2. Words that are popular as meta-tags or ‘in content’ keywords

Words that are popularly searched for are words that you want to use, but many times not if they are also popularly used in meta-tags. Let us take the key term “video games”. This term is too popular for most websites to get any kind of search engine ranking for that term. In fact a website that uses the video game key term has over 803 million competitors! This does not mean that you should not use the term at all, just don’t rely on bringing in visitors by ranking high on the search engines with it. Use other keywords and terms that are related to the products, but might not be used in a lot of other website’s meta-tags. This is one of the reasons people find SEO difficult to do, it does take some creativity to out-think the competition but not out-think the customers.

What is a good way to check the search popularity of keywords or terms compared to uses in meta-tags? Check the keywords with Google’s Keyword Tool to find the number of times the word or term has been searched on Google.com. Then search the word or term yourself on the popular search engines. Take note of the number of hits for the word or term. Make sure that you use quotation marks to narrow that search to just the term you are interested in. The golden SEO word or terms does sometimes come up. This is a word or term (usually a term) that doesn’t have a lot of pages that use it in it’s meta-tags. If you find one of these, figure out a way to add it to at least one of your pages. If there are very few results for that term, and your page is visible in the search result, you may get extra visitors just from that result.

What do you do if your keywords are all very popular with other web masters? Remember that good Search Engine Optimisation is the sum of many techniques and many keywords. You will still want to put in the popular keywords when creating your meta-tags and visible content. These keywords still apply, they should be considered the foundation of the site, but secondary keyword that are more specific are the ones that will grab your visitors.

For example, if you have a website about running/jogging, these two words will not give you high ranking on search engines. Matching secondary keywords to the main keywords will give you combinations that could give you greater success at drawing in visitors. Reviews on ‘jogging shoes’, local ‘running trails’ and other such content will have a higher chance of getting good search engine ranking, thereby bringing new visitors to the site.