Website design and management for small businesses

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Keywords

12th June 2009

Keywords. Letting the search engines (like Google) lead visitors to your web page for free can be an appealing strategy but you need to make it possible for the search engines to understand what it is that you have on offer.

Any usable web page found by search engine 'spiders' or 'robots' will be indexed so it can be retrieved later in response to search requests. Search engines need to be able to recognise the 'keywords' in the text of your webpage so that they can index your subject matter. They aim to recognise keywords by the number of times they appear in relation to the rest of the text and the prominence they have on the page. A search engine examining this page, for example, might find many occurrences of the words 'web' and 'keyword' and recognise these as keywords. Keywords do not always need to be single words and in fact short phrases of two or three words are often a better choice.

Choosing Keywords. You need to include the right keywords in your text in order to tell the search engines what your web page is about. But if you are trying to use them to attract traffic then there is, obviously, no point in optimising for keywords (or key phrases) that no-one ever searches for. You need to choose your keywords carefully.

Simply choosing the most popular words might not be enough. You need to choose popular search terms which won't present you with overwhelming competition. Try a search yourself with your chosen words. Do they bring up a few million competing web pages? If so then maybe promoting your page using the same words would be a lost cause? Much better if they only bring up a few hundred competitors.

Niche is Nice. Unless you have great expertise or significant resources to back you up then your best strategy might be to find a niche in your particular market - where you can more easily compete. Locality is often a good niche for a small business to aim for. Obviously, if your market is mostly local then local placenames should be a good source of keyword material.

Keep it readable. Try not to get carried away with doing what might help the search engine robots to the detriment of your human visitors. In the end you need to keep your content readable and appealing.

Summary. Find the right keywords in the right niche. Produce some good appropriate content and build your keywords into it. In practice, having chosen your keywords and produced your content you might want to leave the rest to me - I will aim to place the right keywords in the right place with due regard to keyword fequency, density and prominence. I can help you to improve your search engine optimisation over time.