Keywords matter

Everyone is different, people describe things in different ways. Keywords and key phrases that you use to describe your business and your products may be different from the words your customers use. ’Low fares’ is a term used by the airline industry; ’cheap flights’ is the term potential customers will use. Using industry terms instead of customer terms will mean that you won’t be found. If you’ve just invested significant amounts of money in search engine optimisation and you’re not getting enough traffic, this could very well be the reason. It’s worth doing some research into what consumers really do call your products.

How is it possible that a company can invest a significant amount of effort building a website only to discover later that the keywords its potential clients and visitors are using are not in the site?

The following springs to mind:

• Often site designers do spend a little time thinking about search engine performance, however they’re not experts in your field so they often guess.
• Many sites are built without thinking about search engines. It’s not high on a designers list of priorities, many have no background knowledge of how search engines function so are not best suited to the task.

Understanding the influence of keywords

You visit a search engine to find something, you type in a couple of words or a phrase, click the search button. The search engines dips into its index to serve you with results matching your search.

Taking the example of ’cheap flights’ from above, a search engine will try and match ’cheap flights’ with pages that:

• contain the exact phrase ‘cheap flights’
• don’t have the phrase ‘cheap flights’, but do have the words ‘cheap’ and ‘flights’ in close proximity.
• contain the words ‘cheap’ and ‘flights’ somewhere in the text, not necessarily close together.
• Pages that contain word stems; for instance, pages containing the word ‘cheap’ and the word ‘flights’ somewhere on the page.
• have links pointing to them, in which the link text contains the phrase ‘cheap flights’.
• with links pointing to them with the link text containing the words ‘cheap’ and ‘flights’, although not together.

It’s not as simple as we first made out, there’s other important factors that need to be considered:

• in the page title, heading or subheadings?
• is the keyword found in bold or italics?
• in bulleted lists?
• ........

Despite the above, one theme remains current, if a search engine can’t relate your website to the words that someone searches for, then it has no reason to return your website as part of the search results.

Keyword Analysis

You must conduct a keyword analysis – check what keywords people use to search on the web. Spending hours optimising your site for a set of keywords you think is good, only to find that they’ve missed the mark is pretty frustrating.

• Identify the obvious keywords – create a list of keywords, anything that comes to mind.
• Analyse your web stats – web stats are able to show you the keywords visitors used when they clicked a link to your site. (generally known as referrers or referrals)
• Examine the competition – You need to know who your competitors are. Visit their sites and open the source code (right click → view source) of a couple of pages. Look for the tag, you should find some useful keywords there.
• Brainstorming with colleagues – Discuss the list with friends and colleagues, they may be able to come up with some keywords.
• Synonyms – Check a thesaurus, there might be additional keywords that you haven’t thought of yet.

Keyword Analysis Tools

Once you’ve put together a decent sized list, your next step is to use a keyword tool to discover additional terms you haven’t thought of and help you determine which keywords are best suited. The following online tools are highly recommended:

• Overture
• wordtracker.com
• Google Adsense
• Google Webmaster Tools
  

When you’ve finished, have a look at the final list to determine how popular a keyword phrase actually is. You’ll probably find that many of the keywords on your original list are not worth bothering with.

Take another look at your list, it’s now time to finalise it by removing:

• keywords that miss the target – anything that causes confusion
• very broad keywords – usually highly competitive and over populated
• ambiguous terms

If you are tempted to go after high-ranking words, make sure that people are actually searching for your products when they type them in and not something else.

ry coder

Ryland is both our chief organizer and project analyst, and he still finds the energy to 'head-up' the wight365 technical team. A computer science graduate, he spent time with the MOD before being invited to join us on the south coast. We're pleased to say, he's still here!

As a 'coder' Ryland has wide ranging experience of current Microsoft technologies as well as many of the 'open source' alternatives.