What to Keep in Mind About Keywords

When building a new website, it's really not enough to just whip up a site and let it be, hoping for hoards of traffic to arrive and purchase your products and services. In order to get indexed by the search engines, and in order for people to find our websites, we must generate good keywords. Once we create a list of keywords that people might use to find our sites, there are a few more important steps to consider.

It's not just about generating a list of keywords and using those keywords on your site. We have to find the right keywords, and by that, I mean keywords that are closely related to your site's content. If you own a website about how to make a good residual income online, then use specific keywords such as "residual income" that people are likely to search. Once you've found keywords like this that are likely to be searched though, you have to do your research, and look for terms that are not the most highly searched and popular, but that people might still search. You can do this using one of the many keyword search tools available on the net today. This will tell you how popular or not your search term is. If you choose keywords say above 2000 searches per month and less than 30000 searches per month, you are probably choosing a decent keyword that can get you the results you seek. Make sure you don't just choose keywords once and leave them alone forever. Every month or so, check your keywords and their popularity, and make modifications as required.

Next, you want to include those keywords in various parts of your website so that the search engines can find them when they spider your site. The first place to consider using your keywords is right in the title tag headline of your site. Do this for all of your website pages, not just the main page. You can also place your keywords in your header, alt, anchor tags, bold and italic tags, body, URLs, file names, and meta tags. Be careful not to plug up your site with these keywords though, or you will get penalized by the search engines and get the opposite result of what you want. It's more important to have solid, quality content on your site than it is to pack your site with keywords. It's good to repeat your keywords, but not too much. You only have to use your keywords once in each tag, and especially near the top of your pages. You can actually use the words repeatedly with the body text, as long as you're not over-doing it, and the words are highly relevant.

One way that you can get ahead of your competitors and the similar keywords they use for their sites is by using two or three word phrases rather than single keywords that are searched more often. Look at your competitor's source code when you view their sites and notice what keyword phrases they are using or not using, and what tags they have that contain or do not contain important keywords. If their sites are lacking in some way, you can gain an edge on them by doing what they have not. You should also keep tabs on your own website statistics by finding out what keywords your website visitors are using to find your site. That way you will know which keywords generate the most hits and which you should be using more or less of. If you follow these tips and ensure your site has quality content on all of its pages, you will have competitors trying to get ahead of you!

About the Author
Liane Bate owns a Plugin Profit Site web business, is a member of Success University, and the IAHBE. Visit: http://www.HonestMoneyMaking.com and http://www.HonestMoneyMaking.com/pips.html