How to Choose the Best Keywords for Your Web Site

To draw the right kind of visitors to your web site - those who will be most likely to take the action you want them to take - you need to provide the search engines with the right keywords and keyword phrases by optimizing your site around those terms.

Ideally, you would select the right keywords before building your web site rather than retrofitting your site to the right keywords, but optimization is still a good idea even if you have to go back and redo things.

If the keywords you choose are too general, you will likely draw a poorly targeted audience that will eat up bandwidth without adding much to your bottom line. If the keywords are too competitive you may draw the right kind of visitors, but in far fewer numbers than you'd like.

If your keywords are not chosen with great precision, no matter how great your web site is or how aggressive your marketing efforts are, the right people may never find your site. Obviously then, your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

Now, most people assume they already know exactly the right keywords to focus their site around. Unfortunately, if they haven't followed a few specific steps, they are usually WRONG!

It's hard to be objective when you're so familiar with your business, which is why it can be difficult to choose the best keywords. It's hard to "think like your customers" when you know your business so well.

There are two ways to approach your business from the outside, which is to say, more as your customer sees it. One is to use software, which we'll go into a little farther along in this article.

The second way is to take the direct route, which is simply to ask as many potential customers as you can. You will often find the keywords you accumulate from your customers are words and phrases you wouldn't have thought of from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Once you have gathered as many keywords and phrases from outside sources as you can, add your own to the list. Once you have this list in hand you are ready for the next step—evaluating them.

The purpose of evaluating the keyword list is to narrow it down to a small number of keywords and phrases that will draw the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By "quality visitors" I mean the consumers who are most likely to make a purchase or take whatever action you want them to take. There are three aspects of a keyword to evaluate:

• Popularity
• Specificity
• Motivation

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more often it's typed into the search engines. Now, that doesn't necessarily equate to receiving floods of visitors because the competition is often fierce for popular keywords. In order to draw the traffic, you must beat out the competition for search engine placement.

Micro Niche Finder is a software program that will rate the popularity of keywords. Using Micro Niche Finder is the second method of generating a good keywords list, as it will suggest related keywords based on your input. But that's not all—it also rates how much competition there is for those keywords. That's why Micro Niche Finder is the main tool we use to find keywords and analyze the competition for them.

» For more info on Micro Niche Finder, refer to our review.

Because a keyword is popular doesn't mean automatically eliminating it. A lot of webmasters aren't very good at optimizing a site for search engine placement. If you are, you may well be able to beat most of them and get a good placement, which means reasonably targeted traffic to your site. However, the evaluation process is far from over at this point.

Evaluating the specificity of a keyword is simply a way of targeting visitors who are ready to buy. The more specific your keyword is targeted to someone who is at the "ready to buy" stage, the better your chances of making a sale.

Let's look at a hypothetical example to make the point clear. Imagine you have a business that specialized in replacing worn out grips on golf clubs, that your business is located in Denver, and that your site ranks well for the keyword phrase, "golf clubs." You will draw all kinds of visitors with a good ranking for that phrase, but let's look at a few examples of what those visitors may really be looking for:

• People looking to buy golf clubs
• People looking for golf courses (clubs)
• People looking for groups (leagues) for friendly competition

That's just a few examples. Other visitors could arrive looking for different things, and maybe some of them will live in Denver and are looking to have their grips replaced.

As you can see from that example, even dominating a popular keyword won't necessarily bring quality visitors. Using specificity to find the right kind of visitors is how to win high quality, targeted traffic. The really good news in that is the more specific the group you are able to target, the less competition there usually is for those keywords.

Which brings us to the third factor: motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer.

Let's go back to our golf club grip replacement service example. Since your service serves a local market, would you be better off targeting "golf club grip replacement" or "golf club grip replacement in Denver?" The person looking for your service won't want to ship his clubs to Florida, he'll want to use a local service. Given this fact, he will probably include "Denver" in his search phrase. By targeting that, you have a much better chance of drawing high-quality, targeted traffic.

This is an essential concept so I'm going repeat it:

Raw numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do.

You need to find keywords that draw the kind of consumer mindset you are looking for, whether you want them to buy your product, join your mailing list, download a trial version of your product, or whatever action it is you want them to take.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work—and it is! Success doesn't come to the lazy, but the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your rewards . . . for better or worse!