Find the best keywords is crucial when you have a website to promote. When you finally get a hold of the best keywords, most search engines will work in your favor and greatly increasing potential sales. If you do not, your work will become lost in cyberspace. Fortunately, many of the tools to help you find these magical keywords can be accessed freely online. With a little work and research, you will be able to optimize your pages in no time!
Relevancy
An ideal keyword has the closest language and terminology relevancy between the products or services with everyday language people use. Once you finish your webpage to be published online, you want to make sure the phrases in your title and sprinkled throughout your copy target the most relevant keywords.
1. The search engines will match search queries with keywords on your pages and in your title.
If you want someone who types in “marketing for book writers” to find your webpage, then you need to make sure that the entire phrase, “marketing for book writers” appears in your title and several times in your page copy. As far as the Google algorithms go and those of other search engines, if your page does not even use the phrase people look for, why post it first in a search listing?
2. People will not click through to pages that do not relate to what they seek.
Even if you do manage to rank well for certain phrases, if those phrases do not match with what the search engine user is looking for, they will skip your listing. If you did end up ranking for “marketing for book writers” but your title reads Publishing for Fiction Writers, then most of the people typing that phrase, even if you end up in the number one spot, will not visit your site.
Most people need information quickly and will not waste their time with irrelevant information.
Researched Fact: About 42% of people will rephrase their search if they do not see a relevant link on the first page of search results, and 88% will do so if they do not find one on the first three pages.
Evaluate
All things being equal, if everyone aimed for the most relevant keywords, the search engines still need to come up with some formula to sort the best pages from the lesser ones. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all use many factors to determine this and no one knows the real algorithms used (do not trust any SEO adviser who claims they do!). You can however, examine your competition. Basically, for any given keyword, you want to see if you can compete with the other pages already ranked against them and possibly out rank them.
Your goal? To get on the first page search listing for your targeted keywords. Know that based on research studies, at least 62% of people click on a link within the first page of search results and about 42% click on the first link. If you do not get listed near the top of the page, or at least on the first page, you could very well lose over half of all potential visitors.
Three ways to know if you can knock down the competition
1. More inbound links pointing to your webpage.
The more other pages link to your page, the higher your chance of ranking on the first page of results in a search engine, especially for Google and Yahoo! If you know you optimized your webpage for keywords and you know more pages on the web link to yours than to the webpages on the current search listing for your targeted keywords, then you will most likely be able to rank there as well.
I am talking about webpages because each page receives its own rank for keywords. People get confused with websites and webpages. If you have not already, you need to start thinking in micro terms. The best way to improve traffic to your website is to optimize each individual page, treating it as its own target destination.
2. Higher code to text ratio.
Many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts claim that text to code ratio matters in rankings – that pages with more content and less HTML will do better. The text to code ratio usually decreased with the decrease in search engine ranking. The pages lower on the list contained way more code then content.
After factoring in inbound links, if the pages ranked for your targeted keywords contain way more code than text compared to your page, you might be able to bump them in the ranking.
3. Older websites.
Like code to text, you might hear much about domain age as being a key element. I would emphasize that finding the right keywords and inbound links will always matter most, but if you still need some narrowing down power, you can look into the site’s age as well. Older sites tend to fare better than newer sites.
