Website
Content and Keywords

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Website Promotion Basics 2
Content and Keywords

16th June 2007

How does your webpage get its message across to the search engine robots as well as to its human visitors?

• Content is King. Whether your webpage holds something as self-serving as a sales message, as trivial as your views on the latest fashion in geekwear or as astounding as the secret of life, the universe and everything, the content is what counts. But making your content interesting, informative, entertaining or otherwise useful enough for people to want to stay and view it is only half the battle. The other part of the equation is to make sure that people arrive there in the first place.
  
  
• Keywords. Letting the search engines lead people 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 word 'web' and recognise this a keyword. 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.
  
  Find out which keywords people are actually using and spot related keywords by using one of the free or paid services on offer. At the time of writing, wordtracker.com provides free trials of its keyword research tools and is well worth a visit.
  
  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? Or maybe they only bring up a few hundred or a couple of thousand competitors? Much better.
  
  

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.

Summary. Find the right keywords in the right niche. Produce some good appropriate content and build your keywords into it. Optimise your web page for the search engines in terms of keyword fequency, density and prominence.

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© Trevor Womack 2007