SEO Keyword Tips

Utilize these SEO keyword tips to help your website rank better in the search engines.
Side Note: SEO (Also known as search engine optimization)

Optimizing Your Website for the Search Engines - Part 2

Choosing the right keywords for your web page boils down to this: If you don’t have your keywords chosen well and incorporated throughout the page of your website through various SEO techniques, you won’t be found in the search engines when it comes time to promote your wares!

So, you must spend time and research in finding out what people will type into a search engine to find your site. It will be how people will find you so PLEASE don’t shrug it off lightly.

I’ll explain choosing your keywords by giving you a real time example. Let’s use this company for an example:

A real estate website located in Langley, British Columbia who sells/buys homes in the Langley area.

As a general rule of thumb, when choosing keywords, it is easier to optimize for phrases instead of individual words like “realtor”.

Examples of basic keyword phrases which first come to mind for this company might be:

* Real estate
* Top Realtor
* Homes for sale

What is wrong with these keywords however is that someone from Asia could type in “Homes for sale” that wants to buy a house in Asia. And, here’s the prob: We don’t have any homes for sale in Asia only in Langley! Which brings us to an important strategy in choosing your keywords….localization!

Keywords localized for this real estate agent could be:

* Langley Real Estate
* Langley Homes for Sale
* BC Real Estate
* BC Top Realtor

However, you may still find a ton of competitive websites all striving for these localized keywords if you lived in a huge metro area like Toronto. So, you must start thinking of why a user is coming to your website and for what second tier service?

* Relocation to Langley
* Langley Condos
* Langley Schools

These could all be second keywords phrases as well and easier to optimize for a #1 ranking in the search engines. Hopefully you get the drift here but also remember when choosing your keywords, don’t use phrases people won’t look for like “blonde Langley realtor”

So now you’ve come up with a list of 10-20 keyword phrases hopefully. What is the competition out there for these words? How effective will they be? This is where you need to do a bit of research on your part to narrow down this list.

You may want to determine the (Keyword Effectiveness Index) KEI of your targeted keywords at Wordtracker. This website will compare how many times a search is done for a particular keyword phrase and It will also show you the amount of competition you have for that keyword phrase on a specific search engine. This website is limited however unless you pay but it does give you a good start. You can however pay by the day and it is only around $8. I suggest to everyone starting out to pay for this service for at least one day as it is very beneficial to the search engine optimization of your website that you choose the correct keywords and phrases.

Another avenue to try is the Google Sandbox where you can type in one of your keyword phrases and get lots of other suggestions.

Once you get the suggestions from Google, you may want to check out the competition on these keywords by going to Overture's suggestion toolbox.

Another area to find different keywords is with the use of a good ole therasus.

Also a good place to find keywords is by looking at your log files. See what people have already typed in to find you to date. You are already found with these keywords, why not optimize these keywords to #1.

Stay turn for Part 3 in upcoming future issues of VANF Newsletter.

More SEO Tips (Part 3)

About the Author:
Tawnya Sutherland is a Certified Internet Marketing Specialist and also a Canadian Certified Virtual Assistant. Founder of the VANF Forum for Virtual Assistants and Author of The VAS System, a business start-up system for virtual assistants.