Online Manual - Search Engines - Keywords
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Keywords

You must decide what KEY WORDS you want people to find you by. This is not trivial. Take some time out to jot down all the keywords you can think of that you would use to find what your site has to offer. Then, ask several friends, relatives, or whoever. Get as many collected as you can think of.

Suppose you are trying to sell tropical fish over the Internet. The obvious keywords appear immediately - tropical and fish. However, as you know by now, if someone were to type in those particular keywords, they are going to wind up at a site with a picture of John Doe in the Bahamas posing next to a large sailfish he caught. So in essence, when someone searches using those two key words, you are going to be competing with every page on the Internet that has either of those two words in their titles. You are going to be competing with John Doe and his vacation photos, with all the travel agents selling people on the great fishing there is near the tropical islands, plus, all the people who are interested in raising tropical fish and share their own tips for care, etc. You are going to find sites that list the best fishing sites in Texas, or a page selling Tropical fruit drinks. You get the idea, and see why it is tough to get your site noticed.

But back to our keyword search words. After this discussion, I can immediately think of a few more words that if a person used they would find my site. "Aquarium" is a good one. How about the less technical "Fish Tank" or "Pet Fish", or even just "Pets". Another good one is "salt water fish". Now you've just increased your potential audience from those few that will specifically search using "Tropical Fish", to those that will search all the other keywords. Some additional keywords you might use are "fish for sale", "exotic fish", and names of typical species of fish, such as "clownfish" or "angelfish". Now, you will want to mix and match some of these words. For example, it is possible someone will search "tropical aquariums", or "salt water aquariums". The list can get pretty endless, but generally, don't go over three words. Most people will only search for one, two, or three keywords. Only if a search is unsuccessful will they add additional keywords, and normally, they will just change the words completely rather than add more.

All search engines will score your page higher if the keywords in your page fall in the same order as those that the searcher entered. For example, if a person searches on "tropical fish aquariums", a site with the words "tropical fish aquariums are our specialty" will score higher than one with the words "aquariums and tropical fish for sale".

Now that you have your list, decide which ones you'd like to keep and which ones you don't want to keep. The more keywords you keep, the more work you will have when creating your html documents, but the more people you will attract. Still, you probably just want to start with the 5 most likely keywords. You can always come back and use the others later.

Here is where the real work begins. Again, knowledge of the Internet is your best resource. I've seen too many people start web sites who think Yahoo is a web browser. They simply have not been searching the web long enough and have very little information.


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