Find Keywords that Sell

There was a time when humans told computers what to do. It seems that, all too often in today’s world, computers now tell us what to do. We receive letters through the post from our banks, insurance companies, etc. which have obviously never been near a human being, but are churned out by a computer activated by some predetermined plan or event. On all too many occasions these don’t match our personal situation in any way because the only human brain which has been involved in the process is the one which programmed the computer sometime last year!

This means that much of our reciprocal communication involving computers is governed by the programming of the system we are communicating with. As the parents of a disabled daughter, my wife and I have found the bureaucracy we have to deal with becoming more and more computerised. The problems that this creates for many like us, is that our children are unique and, therefore, do not fit the criteria on the computerised forms. So often we find ourselves faced with questions which require a simple “yes/no” answer, when neither response accurately describes our daughter’s situation or condition. We try to leave the answer box blank but the computer insists that we give an answer before continuing to the next question. We are faced, therefore, with a situation of having to give inaccurate information (to lie) in order to complete the form which can, of course, rebound on us and our daughter in the future.

So, what has given rise to this rant about computerisation? It all came into my head whilst thinking about the topic of this article which is “Keywords”. In order to draw people to our websites, sales letters and articles using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) we first have to get a good ranking on Google, etc. so people will arrive at our sites to read what we have to say. So, before we can speak to human beings, we first have to learn how to speak to the Search Engine computers and persuade them to show us in a good light to our potential customers. That is where keywords play such an important part.

Let’s first have a look at exactly what keywords are and how to go about choosing the best options. Keywords are used by search engines to match your website with the words which internet users type into their search engine. The more keywords (quality keywords that is) that are found on your webpage the more likely it is to get a good response from the search engines. However, don’t overdo the keywords or the search engine is likely to reject your site and give it a low ranking. Keywords should be carefully and subtly worked into quality content, which is after all, what you are trying to present to your potential customer. There is no point in writing your copy purely for the search engine if it is of little value to the human beings who will ultimately read it.

It is all about balance. This is why it is so important to get the best keywords possible. Just a couple of brilliant keywords will get you a much better ranking than overloading your copy with ten poor ones. So, choosing keywords is part of the website marketing process: having the right keywords appear on a webpage will result in increased traffic to your site; – increased traffic = increased sales. If your keywords are too general and too popular your site will get lost in the crowd. The trick is to find terms which are not too popular.

There are many different views on how to assess the quality of keywords. One of my favourites and one of the easiest to use is that you look at websites in Google, trying a variety of related keywords (always enter these in quotation marks) until you find one that gives fewer than 30,000 webpages in your niche. (I have seen 20,000 given as an alternative figure) Then using that word or phrase go to a keyword selection tool and try to find an off-shoot of that word or phrase which gets at least 100 visitors per day. As I said earlier, we are looking for words and phrases which are popular but not too popular. Those figures should give you what you need.

If we are to get the traffic to visit our webpages, we need to learn how to speak to computers first before we can speak to human beings. If we don’t learn how to do this, by the use of quality keywords, we are going to struggle in the world of internet business.