What are keywords? Keywords are a reference point to lead people searching for information that you may provide at your website. Keywords may either be a single word or a phrase. These keywords are usually relevant to your content and are a focus for your article or web pages. The question always arises when one is developing an internet article or website - what keywords do I use? There are two perspectives to this which are a) What are people searching for and b) And what are search engines looking for.
To answer the first of these questions, we need to know our target audience intimately. What are their interests, likes, dislikes, concerns and problems. What questions would they have. Remember that people are searching for answers to these and you must provide them within a half a minute of their viewing you site if you are to be successful. The keywords that you use is just the facilitator in this regard.
In a nutshell you are providing people with what they want. For example, if your subject is losing weight, although you may be providing them with dietary advice you are in fact selling how to acquire a good physical image, energy and self confidence. If you are selling the home based business concept, you are in fact selling how to have access to additional income or how to be able to leave your current job and work at your own business from home. These are the aims and objectives that your keywords, website and articles must provide for success.
Following now are some search engine tips:-
a) Start with less competitive keywords. As stated before keywords can either be a single word or a phrase which can be a sentence with up to eight words called log-tailed phrases. If you use a single word keyword these should be in "parenthesis" for exact search and should attract less than five thousand results when they are put under a Google Search . The long tail phrases should directly provide answers to searchers such as for example "How to Develop and Use Keywords For Search Engine Optimization". These again when tested in a Google Search this should reveal less than 5000 responses ideally when placed in parenthesis. The lesser the number of search results means that your article or website stand a greater chance of being listed in the top ranks of the search engines.
b) Another important aspect of keywords apart from its relevance is where they should be placed. Keywords should be placed in titles and sub-titles. They may be bolded, put in italics and should placed in the first paragraph, the last paragraph and the body of the article.
c) A lot has been said by many about keyword density and the need to present to the search engine crawler enough evidence of the presence of the particular keyword throughout the article. Search engine crawlers are now very sophisticated in that they can detect when one is stuffing one's article or website with keywords. The search engines much prefer when the article flows naturally and for this purpose a keyword density should only be used 2 to 5 times per 100 words (2-5%). Anything greater than this and the crawlers become somewhat suspicious and can penalize you for this.
Finding Good Keywords.
There are many good free tools on the market that one may use for getting good keyword ideas. Two such free tool are provided by at the link below.
These software can provide for you many lists of good keyword variations which you can use in your articles. They also provide some estimates of daily searches but these are not terribly accurate. The paid versions of the software is much more accurate.
Anchor Text
Many of us use anchor text in our article or website to direct our readers to another web page. There are certain rules of good anchor text strategy which if followed can lead to increased conversion rates. The first rule is that anchor texts should be relevant to what the person is searching for. The second rule is that it should flow naturally and be relevant to the content of the article. The third is that the anchor text should tell the viewer where he is being taken to (whether it is more information, a newsletter, a purchasing web-page etc.).Searchers do not like to be surprised so that you should be honest in this regard.
As far as the search engines are concerned, one should use keywords in the anchor texts for the best results. The link (web-page) should be relevant to the subject and the site you are taking them to should have the keywords in their title tags and text. Of great importance is the avoidance of the anchor texts such as "click here" and "more info here". These tell the search engines nothing and does not help in your search engine optimization cause.
Nigel_Gittens
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