Building Keyword Lists and
Their Proper Placement

The challenge for a Web builder who wants to drive traffic to their site is to know what keywords the searchers are using and then to optimize their Web pages using these keywords to get the highest possible ranking by the search engines for those keywords.
 

Picking the Right Keywords For Your Pages

1. Make a list of the "words" and "phrases" you think people might use in a search engine if they are looking for what your site has to offer.  A keyword can be a single word or a phrase, whereas "keyword phrase" always implies multiple words, like: "Custom Built Cabinets".
   
   You might come up with a long list to start with, but you will be narrowing it down to just a few keywords for each page in your site.
2. Pick keywords that accurately reflect what your Website is about. Whether you have a business, personal or information site, your keywords should reflect your content.
3. The words should be specific enough so they describe something about your site, but not so unique that it would be unlikely that someone would enter them in a search query:
    
   • Example of the General term: "Garden"
   • More specific term: "Flower Garden"
   • More specific term: "Backyard Flower Garden"
   • More specific term: "Backyard Perennial Flower Garden"
   • An Overly Unique Phrase: "Small Backyard Yellow Perennial Flower Garden with some Annuals.
4. Next use one of the Keyword Tools I discuss in the Topic on Keyword Tools to see how popular these keywords are in the search engine queries.  Take note of the words and phrases that the tools list and how often they are searched for.  The more often they are searched for, the more popular the keyword is.
5. Finally, based on the results from the Keyword Tool searches, pick just a few  keywords and/or phrases for each page that you want to optimize for the search engines.
    

The keywords you end up with might not be the keywords you started out with.  You might want to use the keywords that the tools listed.  Keep in mind that the more popular a keyword or keyword phrase is, the more competition there will be from other Web sites in using those words.

When you are starting out with a new Website, it's best to use keywords that are not the most popular ones. The more popular a keyword or phrase is, the more competition there will be from other websites using them.  Using less popular keywords will give you a better chance at getting closer to the top of search engine listings. 

The longer phrases, called Long-Tailed Keywords,  (3 or 4 or 5 words long as opposed to just 1 or 2 words) are more search specific and will not be searched for as often as the shorter phrases.  But, by using the longer phrases, it will be easier for you to capture your share of hits, if your pages are properly optimized. 

As your site and pages get better rankings and you get more inbound links from other sites, then you might consider using some of the more popular (and more competitive) keywords as you will be better situated to take on the "stiff competition" that you will encounter by using them.

Where to Place Your Keywords in Your Pages:
(For the Pages you want To Be Highly Indexed by the Search Engines)

1. HEADING TAGS <h1> and <h2>
   The <h1> and <h2> heading tags are especially important.  Use the <h1> tag to indicate the beginning of your content.  Use the <h2> tag as a sub-heading or a paragraph heading.  Theses two tags are given extra weight by the spiders when they contain your keywords and you also have your keywords in your content.
2. META KEYWORDS TAGS
   Put all of your keywords for a page in the Keywords Meta Tag for that page.
   
   The Meta Tags are covered in more depth in the previous tutorial topics on "Meta Tags" and "The Keywords and Description Tags" .
3. Don't repeat a keyword or keyword phrase more than once in the Keyword tag.  Search engines may consider this to be "keyword spamming" and automatically reduce your ranking.
4. Use keywords in the content of your pages but don't overlook the fact that you are writing content for people to read, and also in hopes that they will want to link to your pages.
5. Don't overuse keywords in your content.  "Overusing" keywords to get a better ranking is called "keyword stuffing" or "keyword stacking" and the search engines can spot it and may ding you for it.
6. Use the keywords that are appropriate for the content of each page.  Each Web page of your site will be different (or should be), so don't create a list of keywords for the home page and then just copy the same list to every other page.  Remember, to get better search engine results, the keywords for a page need to relate to the content of the page.

Stay Alert

Once you've completed placing the right keywords in the right places on each of the pages you want optimized, you need to keep one eye on their status with the search engines and the other eye on your competition.  If you don't, your competition could out-optimize you and knock you back down in the rankings without you even knowing it.

1. Monitor your server logs or Website statistics after you are finished to see what search terms people have used to find your pages.  Based on your findings, you might want to make some changes.
2. Experiment: Try different search terms to see what will find your competitors Websites. 
3. Investigate:  Check out the source code on your competitors pages to see what keywords they are trying to use to bring in traffic.

In the next section I'll tell you about some of the Very Good Keyword tools that are on the market.  Some of them are FREE.

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