by Christina Pomoni

Created on: August 07, 2010

Selecting appropriate keywords and keyword phrases that can drive organic traffic to your website is the most important task you need to undertake when planning your website deployment. Even well-structured websites with eye popping text and graphics may flunk overnight if they lack the appropriate keywords to bring traffic in. However, with the right selection of keywords, your website’s ranking in the rating systems will increase, and the future flow of your website will run on increased traffic levels.

The winning equation of website marketing is increased website traffic = increased sales. Although it seems quite straightforward, many website owners fail to resolve it. In this context, there are several factors that need to be taken into consideration when selecting the appropriate keywords to increase your website’s visibility in the major search engines.

In particular:

a) Keyword relevance

If you are selling sports equipment in your website, you need to use keywords that are highly relevant to your products. For instance, relevant keywords would be “fitness equipment”, or “outdoor exercise equipment” rather than “leisure” or “recreation”. You should use the most appropriate keywords that reflect your website’s mission and objectives. Otherwise, the particular keywords will never be searched and you will not make money.

b) Keyword popularity

Try to figure out what users would enter in their search engines when looking for similar products or services. Then, ask your customers, friends, family and broader environment what words they would use to search for your site. This is particularly important information because these are real people who will search for your online site. After you have gathered a lot of keywords, plug them in a keyword research tool that you like the most and check out the number of searches conducted for each of them for a given period of time. You may use WordTracker, Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool, Keyword Discovery or Yahoo Advertising, which are the most popular keyword research tools.

After you identify the popularity of each keyword, put them in a spreadsheet and go over each one of them to delete the keywords that do not offer much in terms of website optimization when returning corresponding search values. Basically, you have to identify as many keywords as possible, but then narrow down your list to those that (1) return a great number of searches, (2) are likely to lead to high conversion rates and (3) are competitive.

c) Avoid generic keywords

Customers are the lifeblood of any business and this is valid for e-commerce as well. Especially, in respect to web marketing efforts, the lack of personal contact may lead to conveying the wrong message to your target audience. By using generic keywords, you may have a lot of views in your website, but you are less likely to have quality web content and traffic. Consequently, you are less likely to have traffic converted into sales.

Overall, selecting the appropriate keywords requires careful steps and patience. If a keyword is really popular but quite irrelevant to your products or services, it won’t bring traffic to your website. Therefore, make sure to select good keywords that can really strike a balance between relevance and popularity. Your aim is to convert web traffic into sales.

Sources:

http://www.objectwareinc.com/KeywordSelectionTechniq ue.aspx

http://www.buildwebsite4u.com/building/keywords.shtm l

http://www.avangate.com/articles/keyword-research_40 .htm

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