Keyword Targeting General Overview

Without good rankings in the top 10 to 30 positions in the major search engines, you are missing the bulk of your potential Internet client base. Why? Because most people will hardly look beyond the first page of links returned after they run a search. If your site is not in the top 30 positions, up to 80% of your potential Internet client base will not know you exist.

The Myth: Simply submitting your Web site to hundreds of search engines will increase traffic to your site. Another myth is that simply inserting META tags in your web pages will also increase your traffic. Both are just not true. META tags and submitting are recommended, but by themselves, these steps will not get you anywhere. You’ll get a lot of e-mail from companies offering to submit your site to thousands of engines for a very low rate. These are usually worthless unless your site has pages optimized for each of the major search engines.

SEARCH ENGINE POSITIONING

- this is by far your best and most affordable option.

Consider these statistics: Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking for by visiting the top 18 search engines. Many of these searches may be for the products and services that you offer. Everybody knows that even a few good positions on even one or two important engines can drive thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to your web site each day.

IMPORTANT! Below is important information you will want to study in order to “make the most” of your publicizing campaign.

Using the right key words is everything…

Key words and phrases are the tools most visitors to your site will use to locate you. For this reason, selecting the best key words for your site is a must. Often business owners are wrong about the key words that prospects will use to find them.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT KEYWORDS

Keyword Phrase Selection

This is the single most important element of any search engine publicizing campaign. When potential customers or “prospects” use a search engine like MSN to look for your products and services, they will use a “key word phrase” to find you. For example, a prospect seeking landscaping services in Los Angeles might enter “landscaping” in the search query box. The prospect will quickly be overwhelmed with sites related to landscaping from around the world.

The prospect will then most likely narrow his search and enter the search phrase of “landscaping services”. Although he narrowed his search from just landscaping to landscaping services, he is still overwhelmed with landscaping services in New York and Montana and even Africa. The prospect is seeking landscaping services in his city of Los Angeles.

If the prospect has half a brain, he will now narrow his focus even more and enter the key word phrase “landscaping services Los Angeles” or “Los Angeles Landscaping Services”. At this point, one of the companies listed in the top 20 search results is likely to get an inquiry from this prospect.

By selecting the right key words, and with a lot of hard work, you’ll see your site’s traffic begin to soar in the coming months.
There are several good techniques you can apply to determine what people might be searching for:

  1. Put yourself in their shoes and brainstorm.
  2. See what keywords your competitors are targeting to spur new ideas.
  3. Organize and focus your keywords into short phrases, etc.

However, the best way is to stop guessing and actually SEE what people are
searching for. To do this, just Click Here for the Overture Search
Suggestion Tool.

This tool allows you to see how many times a key word phrase was typed in at
Overture.com during a one month time period.
An additional tool is “WordTracker” Key Word Suggestion Tool. This is a free service provided by
WordTracker to compel you to buy their professional package. You don’t need to buy the professional package just click on the link to “Free Trial” and you’ll get all the help you need with key word phrase selection. It allows you to see which key words have been entered in to search engines recently.

Please go there now, find the free trial and begin entering possible key words. Examine the results and get new ideas. Now read our strategy below.

Note: Wordtraker Is Not The Final And Ultimate Authority On Key Word Phrase Selection, It’s Simply An Idea Or Brainstorming Tool. Don’t Take This Site Too Seriously.

Here’s the STRATEGY WE RECOMMEND:

  1. Brainstorm about general words that apply to your industry and list them all out in a word processor or on paper.
  2. Next, conduct a search for a few of them on a major search engine and then travel to the sites you find in that search.
  3. View the HTML source code of the page and write down the keywords used in the Meta tags and any you see on the visible page. You’ll quickly find a variety of keywords you hadn’t considered before. This does not mean these are the best keywords to target, but it can help you in your brainstorming process.IMPORTANT: Make sure you only write down words and phrases that specifically apply to YOUR business! You don’t want to waste time targeting keywords that will not bring you high quality leads.
  4. At this stage, most people would start GUESSING??? what keywords and phrases people are most likely to search for. Don’t guess! Learn the most popular combinations by taking the individual words and submitting them one at a time into the Search Suggestion Tool or “WordTracker” Key Word Suggestion Tool.
  5. Rarely do you want to target a single keyword since there are billions of words indexed on the Web, generally one word simply won’t cut it. People searching the Web learn quickly that if they type in “homes” or “properties”, they get millions of listings for real estate from all over the world! Now, it would be nice if you were positioned well with some of those single broad keywords, however, a better strategy is to combine the generic keyword with something more specific. For example, instead of the single key word “homes”, you might want to use “Boston Luxury Homes”. This strategy is much more likely to get you to the top and keep you there for an extended period of time.

Use the above instructions to find the best key word phrases for your campaign. Remember Nobody knows your business like you do.

SUBMITTING TO THE SEARCH-ENGINES & DIRECTORIES

80 + % of your traffic will come from these top engines. Some of these engines charge extra just to review your site for admission into their databases.

NOTE - Engine marked with an may require additional fees to have your site be listed

A few of the above engines will require that you pay an extra fee directly to them in order to be reviewed for admission.
You may also use automated software, such as Web Position Gold to submit your site to over 800,000 search engines and directories. As a result of submitting all your main pages plus all the side doors you created to over 800,000 search engines, you will be deluged with hundreds and then thousands of e-mail messages telling you we have submitted your site to various small search engines. These smaller engines will often take this opportunity to try and sell you something that you don’t want or need. Just disregard all of these “spam” messages no matter how urgent or important they may seem.

An alternate approach and our preferred submission method is to place links back to your site in another website or portal site which is heavily traffic by search engine spiders. This allows search engines to find your site on their own, placing a higher value on the link and reducing the amount of spam you receive. An added benefit is that most sites using the “forced spidering® technique” get listed an average of 60% faster in Google.

We also recommend specifically targeting Google (Currently powers Aol,
and Netscape among others.) and
Inktomi (Hotbot,
Look Smart,
Alta Vista, and many more)

RESOURCES YOU NEED

  1. In addition to the basic publicizing, we also recommend you submit your site to Inktomi (charges a minimal annual fee), which may help you get listed in MSN and Hotbot (without needing to use the Look Smart Pay Per Click). To learn more about paid submission services, please visit the following pages.
    Annual low cost solutions:

  2. Access information for each domain you want publicized. This means if you don’t already have it, you need your URL, Password, and Username in order to get into your site and begin enhancing it.
  3. Key word phrases consisting of at least 2 words and up to 5 words. For Example “Luxury Homes” instead of just “homes”.
  4. Marketing text for each key word phrase being publicized. 100 to 500 words each. This marketing text will be used in the creation of your side doors (specialized content pages). If one of your key words is “River Rafting” then you need marketing text describing all the features and benefits of “River Rafting”. You especially need text describing how your river rafting services are different or better than all the others. If you already have plenty of text on your Web pages, just use what you already have written, but be certain to modify it. Some sites actually have very little text about the key word phrases prospects are searching for. If your site has very little text about your key word phrases, focus on writing highly relevant content.
  5. Contact information, including name address, phone number, Fax number, e-mail. If it’s already on your web site there’s nothing to worry about. If not place it clearly on your homepage (as a footer) and contact page. Some directories such as Yahoo require this for their directory listings.
  6. You also need a special e-mail address to use when submitting the site to
    search engines. This special publicizing e-mail address should be different than
    your regular address if you don’t want to receive tons of spam. By creating a
    special e-mail address such as “pubs@yourdomain.com” you can filter out much of the spam.

WAITING FOR RESULTS

Search engines are barraged with millions of site submissions everyday. The top 15 engines don’t accept any information about your site other than it’s URL. Once you submit your URL, they will then send what are called “robots” or “spiders”. The spider normally (Some engines will only go three levels deep, think about adding a site map link on your home page. this will ensure the spiders find every page you want them to.) visits every page on your site, not just the one you submitted. It gathers all the information from each page. For example, title, meta tags, number of graphics and their “ALT-TEXT Tags”, some or all of the text content of each page, number of words visible and invisible on the page, number and content of the links on the page, and even the words that are bolded in ‘Header Tags”.

The spider then puts all that information in storage along with thousands of other sites it has recently indexed. The information about your site just sits their waiting in “queue” to be entered into the search engine’s main database. Some search engines are able to keep up with the load and enter the information about your site within days. Alta Vista and GOOGLE are pretty good at staying caught up. Lycos, Web Crawler and Excite can be very slow taking as long as 3 months or more to enter the information about your site into their database. For this reason, you may see your traffic increase in surges.

Be patient, you will see results.

BE PREPARED

Depending on how much competition there is on the Web for your key words, when the traffic does start coming, it may only be at its peak for a month and then slowly begin declining. Of course, other businesses with less competition enjoy high search engine rankings for over a year or more.

As visitors reach out to you for products and services, treat each contact like gold. It’s important to acknowledge that you received their message and will be giving them prompt responsive assistance with their needs. For example, it would be a mistake to take a 3-week vacation during the time your traffic is peaking.

Some people get so much business during the “peak” that they allow excellent prospects and leads to slip through the cracks. Then later, regret not being more prepared to handle the flow.

Be sure to check your e-mail at least twice per day. Even in the beginning when there may not be much traffic. Checking and responding to your e-mail is a crucial habit to get into and can make the difference between a sale and a lost opportunity.

SITE ENHANCEMENT

If your site is already up and running, we suggest you visit your site as if you were a potential visitor and list both the site’s assets and it’s deficits. See if the site provides a prospect with everything he or she needs to decide to reach out and contact you. Does your site repeatedly provide “calls to action” or is the client encouraged just to passively absorb what’s there and then pass judgment on you?
We suggest a primary goal of your site be to persuade the prospect to contact you not just sell products and services. Once the prospect contacts you then you or your staff can sell them.

After visiting your site and viewing it as a prospect might, if you think the site needs to be modified in minor or major ways, make those modifications!
Need help updating your website? Use our easy estimate, Quote Request Form

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

  • WordTracker: “We compile a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and we tell you how often people search for them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords.”
  • Search Engine Watch: “Search Engine Watch,”
    http://searchenginewatch.com/, is a site that’s designed to keep search engine users and web developers informed about search engine visibility. Likewise, Search Engine Watch provides the latest news and information to help make the searching easier.”
  • Spider Food: Your introduction to search engine marketing online. This site is a virtual search engine encyclopedia.
* This Saeler Enterprises’ FrontPage Marketing & Development article may be freely distributed and reprinted providing that this entire statement, including copyright is present and weblinks are active.
Copyright © by Saeler Enterprises All Right Reserved.
www.globalpresence.com

Filed Under: Keyword Targeting on August 24th, 2005

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