Keyword selection and importance

Keywords are the key to open up the doorway in order to bring-in targeted customers to your online interface, your website. Keywords play very vital role in establishing your business online. Now there will be few questions marks tagged around your head, which are most likely:

· Why to break your head in thinking and using keywords?

· What are the keywords you should be using?

· How to amass these keywords and use them to benefit your business?

If you have an online presence for your business from quite some time and still blinking on the first question, then you should definitely realise that you are far behind in competition. It is very important for one to know what are the keywords associated with one’s own business. These keywords are the phrases or terms by which your prospective customers search for the products or services your business is about and through keywords you can drive very huge traffic to your website.

Keyword selection is very critical task and you should find your keywords in a smart way. In order to know what keywords you should use, you should know what words will come to your customers’ mind when they would want to look out for your products or services. For example, if you have a product line of ‘couch’, then your customers might search it with phrases like ‘single seat couch’, ‘3 seat couch’, ‘leather sofa couch’ etc. You should also be aware of keywords used by your online competitors. Run a small research online in all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, & MSN and check for the keywords your competitors have been using. This will give you a fair idea and help in selecting your right keywords. Keep in mind that your keyword should be explicit to your industry. The more you choose relevant keywords which define your products and services closely, the better quality traffic you will experience on your website.

Once you narrowed down to your keywords, you should know where they stand in the virtual space. There are various famous online tools available through which you can find out the popularity of your keywords but most widely used and recommended is Google Adwords where you can find global and local search numbers for your keywords along with critical information like the region they are searched more and trends. Along with popularity you should also be checking how specific your keyword to your business is. Consider the same example of ‘couch’. Say if you are dealing with ‘sleeper couch’ and but you are using popular generic keywords then for sure you will get a good traffic to website but conversion of visitors to customers might not be that effective because there is a possibility that you will get visitors who were looking for ‘traditional couch’ or ‘ leather couch’ as well. Thus you should make sure that your keywords are specific to your product line or services.

Now that you know what keywords you should be using to describe your product line or services, you should use them in an effective way. Content of your website plays a key role in this. When someone searches using those keywords, search engines look out for the indexed web pages containing those keywords. Thus, while writing content for your website you should use these keywords to describe your product line or services wherever possible and give hyperlinks to corresponding pages. But make sure that you don’t stuff your content too much with keywords as search engines hate such practices. You should also focus on plurals and forms of your keywords in order to give more room to your prospective customers to reach to you.

Once you are done with all this process, don’t forget to monitor the performance of your keywords and keep updating them time to time. Once you master this process, you will see how you play around and juggle with words to get your business benefited.

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Key References:

Dallas Harvey. Choosing The Right Keywords For Your Business. Available: http://www.evancarmichael.com/SEO/1368/Choosing-The-Right-Keywords-For-Your-Business.html. Last accessed 01/08/2010.

Scott Buresh. Facts of the week: How to choose the right keywords for your site. Available: http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter70.htm. Last accessed 01/08/2010.

Wendy Boswell. How To Choose The Right Keywords and Phrases for Your Web Site. Available: http://websearch.about.com/od/quicktipsandtricks/ht/keyword.htm. Last accessed 01/08/2010

Jagadeesh M. Keywords: Search Term - What, How it Works, Types, Operators and Role in SEO. Available: http://knol.google.com/k/keywords#. Last accessed 01/08/2010.

Get started with SEO and Social Media

Are you running a business? Planning for an online presence through a website? Oh, let me guess you already are into the virtual universe of internet. If that’s the case, then welcome friends and be ready to shed more money to fill your pockets with more money. Confused?

After my small research and understanding, I learnt that by just having online presence in the form of a website and not doing any promotional work is actually not of much worth. Yes my dear friends, if you are having a website of your own (personal or business related) then you should look at the options of promoting it and making it more visible to your target audience. This can be achieved in the best way by following various best Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques available to all of us online.

SEO can be categorised into On Page and Off Page SEO. On Page SEO primarily deals with but not limited to finding right keywords for your business and website; developing a best suitable title for each page of your website as search engines look for titles more keenly and it helps in influencing your page ranking; having right description of page (Meta Tag); writing best and genuine content keeping your customers in mind and involving your main keywords in it maintaining their proportion; having blogs with recent and first hand information of your services and products; use of best suited analytic software for you to monitor the traffic received on your website; having internal link building strategy.

Off Page SEO, as the name goes, works off the page to increase your site’s visibility by working along with your On Page SEO elements. Off Page SEO starts after completing your On Page SEO works and deals with but not limited to bookmarking your site in various famous bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and many more; creating separate blogs and promoting your blog in various directories meant for blog promotions like Technorati; link submissions in open directories like Yahoo Directory, DMOZ etc; promotional activities involving photos and videos in various online marketing sites; writing press releases and articles for submission in PR websites and articles sites; running your own Paid Per Click (PPC) campaign; running Social Media campaign on famous social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo; approaching sites who are in the same business like yours in order to share and exchange links with each other and working on affiliate marketing.

Above mentioned activities are something which can be described easily but when you really get on with them, it requires a real lot of time and money to achieve the desired results. However, if you being into online world not promoting and marketing your services and products, then believe me there is someone else who is eating out your share of business. With hard work, patience, and commitment, the above practices will fetch you good fruits on long run.

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Key References:

Melissa. (Feb 12, 2010). How to Start with SEO. Available: http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/seo/how-to-start-with-seo.html. Last accessed 25/07/2010.

Vaidhyanathan. (Sep 16, 2008). 21 Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation. Available: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/21offpage-seo-strategies-to-build-your-online-reputation. Last accessed 25/07/2010.