One of the fundamental tasks for creating a website that attracts traffic from Google and the common search engines is selecting useful and descriptive keywords for your effort. A good term or phrase that accurately describes your product or service or presents the “need” your company serves is essential to building your website into a sales and marketing tool.

Most start up businesses either haphazardly guess at what would be a good keyword or keyword phrase or simply ignore keyword selection altogether. As these words are the ones that search engines will use to catalogue and appropriately display the business website, it is important to select phrases that accurately describe your business and the page to which you want to attract readers.

Keywords are essentially descriptive terms – usually single words or a couple of multi word phrases – that describe what the business page is about. Keywords are stored in ‘metatags’ on the web page and aren’t generally seen unless a user views the source code for the page.

More importantly though, keywords describe your business, the web page and should be used throughout the page. Keyword phrases that appear frequently provide confirmation to Google and others that the page is in fact about what the keywords describe.

Once selected, keywords and keyword phrases should be used in the page title and title tags, headlines within the page (the ‘h’ tags) and then again in the content or text within the page body. As long as the keywords can be reasonably used within the text, they should be. Page developers should be wary of overusing keywords though or otherwise engaging in ‘keyword stuffing.’ This practice is frowned upon by the search engines and causes the copy to read poorly.

The process for selecting keywords can take many forms. Google provides a tool within the Adwords suite that helps evaluate keywords and provides the number of possible searches or ‘impressions’ that a top Google (paid) advertisement could be expected to make. This is useful information even though you are not paying for an advertisement on these pages.

Reading this information, look for the number of searches and level of competition that exists for certain keywords that you propose to the system. Then – especially for new and start up websites – avoid keywords that have a great deal of competition associated with them. This information is provided by the system. These will usually require much greater effort as well as a longer time to start ranking well.

When you believe you may have discovered a good keyword phrase, run a Google search. If major corporate websites appear at the top of the results page, reconsider your choice. If your company page would be up against someone like Bank of America for your keyword term, rest assured that they will ruthlessly compete against anyone using that term – which decreases your opportunity to rank well. (There is a way to compete with the big guys just not head-to-head using their keywords. See the note on including a geographic term below.)

Keyword identification is an ‘artform’ unto itself. Discovering or creating accurate and descriptive terms and phrases that many people search for, but for which not many big companies compete is a difficult chore. The Google Adwords tool is probably the best ally in this search.

A quick note is appropriate here about traffic number that the Google Adwords tool displays. These are not exact counts, but are useful for providing a relative measure of the level of search activity that a keyword term receives.

A certain degree of creativity is also helpful. Organizations that do business in a particular geographic area can use the name of that area in their keyword phrases. Setting one’s business apart from others by using a geographic term (such as “Banks in Birmingham” as opposed to just “Banks”) is a good way to compete with larger organizations. Large companies typically don’t compete well on a local level. Users though, won’t search for a term as broad as “Banks” but will usually restrict their search to a local relevant area.

Flexibility in working with keywords is also helpful over the long term. Some keywords may have to be abandoned if they fail to generate sales and traffic. As the study of consumer behavior is a bit of a guessing game, the web page operator may have to execute quite a few trial and error scenarios before getting one that attracts internet traffic. And for the start up or new business enterprise, searching for effective keywords may not take place quickly.

SEO Consultants in Denver brings many years of experience in link building, keyword selection and website optimization to help companies win new revenue. SEO Consultants Denver quickly deliver top page search engine rankings even for new pages. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service