March 2017

Optimizing your website using the right keywords.

March 24th, 2017 at 1:44 pm

Knowing which keywords and keyword phrases to use is extremely important.

Choosing a single word, like "books", is far too broad and has worldwide appeal. The result is insurmountable amounts of competition. So what does a great keyword phrase look like for you?

A few things can help, but the most important thing is uniqueness and relevance.

Using "books" as an example, you can make the phrase more unique and relevant by providing more details that are important to the people you're trying to reach, for example:

- "Suspense Books for sale in Dallas, Texas" is much better.

- "best suspense books of all time" is another great phrase.

Google, the keyword "books" has nearly 10 billion results, but "best suspense books of all time" has only 2.5 million. Now 2.5 million webpages is a lot to compete against, but it's possible. Beating 10 billion isn't realistic for most websites.

Where can you get help with picking your keyword phrases?

Start by listening to people when they talk to you about your products and services. Listen for words that describe, and incorporate those words into the appropriate pages of your website, such as descriptions on category pages and product pages.

Also include in the category and product page titles and the meta descriptions. I remember a few years ago people were adding "buy" and "for sale" throughout their sites, with the idea that consumers would search for something they want to purchase by adding those words into their search.

So "best suspense books of all time" would be changed to "best suspense books of all time for sale" and "buy best suspense books of all time". Using these kinds of phrases in your product and category titles, meta descriptions and product descriptions will make your pages far more unique, which can land them higher in the search results at Google.

Another place to get ideas is from Google itself. Do a search for your product on Google. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll see related phrases under the heading "Searches related to...". This list is generated by Google from user actions, so it's fairly helpful in finding more unique phrases that people use when searching for your product or service and you should use it as a reference when optimizing your website.