Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

More Notes on Choosing Good Keywords

There are many different keyword phrases that people can use to find our websites on the Search Engines. We have managed to bring good traffic from Search Engines to our website for a variety of keywords. More importantly we rank high for a large variety of 2-5+ word keyword phrases.

This approach is known as targeting “the long tail”. Targeting the long tail in SEO means you are trying to rank high for search terms that are not searched for frequently. Most companies are going after the “short tail”, search terms that are searched for frequently. The reason you want to optimize sites for less competive terms is that you are more likely to rank high for those terms and thus get traffic for those terms. One of the reasons blogs are so succesful is that they can easily target “the long tail”. With tons of content, blogs naturally will rank high for more obscure search terms. These terms with less traffic and less competition can bring in a lot of traffic when you have lots of pages that are targeting the “long tail”.

One major problem with trying to optimize your site for one or two word keywords is that the competition for one word keywords is much higher. It is much easier to rank high for 2-4 word keyword phrases. In fact, the best way to get traffic from the Search Engines is to have a lot of content rich pages that focus on a 2-4 word keyword phrase on each page. This greatly increases the ways that people can find your website through a Search Engine and it makes your website less vulnerable to the effects of major algorithm changes by the Search Engines.

Another thing to consider is that Acronyms are often searched for much more often than the long version of a word. For instance, at the time of the writing of this book WB was searched for many more times than Warner Brothers®, USA was searched for many more times than United States of America, etc.

Acronym Finder is a good tool for finding acronyms to use as keywords. Often times there is less competition for searches on acronyms as well. This means that it can be advantageous to use acronyms for driving traffic to your website through the search engines.

Although I believe KEI is flawed, it can help you find good keywords. So, I wanted to let you know about this great KEI related blog. The blog is called the KEI Observation Deck (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/weblog/). Be sure to check it out! The owner of this blog, John Alexander (author of “Wordtracker Magic”), shows you keywords that have a great KEI ratio. It is one of the most useful blogs I have ever come across.

Just prior to the release of this book (last June) a new tool was developed called Googspy. It is an excellent keyword research tool. I will discuss Googspy in more detail in the PPC portion of this book. It such an amazingly useful tool, that I am surprised they are not charging money for it.

In my next post, I plan on giving you my final thoughts on keywords and let you know the methods I use most frequently for finding good keywords for my websites and blogs.