5. All about Keywords ... Get This Wrong and You Will Fail

Imagine you were a search engine called Google. How would you know if a particular website was relevant to any particular search term.

Think about this for a moment one way is to look for a certain word or phrase called a keyword or keyword phrase AND then assess the importance of that single keyword relative to any other word on the web page that is what Google does and in the blink of an eye.

And of course this is also what the searcher does the searcher types a keyword (think need here) and looks for confirmation that the need has been met by observing the words on the SERPs page that comes up. This is also done in the blink of a eye so youd better make sure you get the searchers attention quickly

5.1. How to discover the right keywords

A keyword is not necessarily a single word when used. In fact a single word keyword finds little practical use on the Internet today. Take the word fountain and do a Google search. Chances are you will not find what you want.

For example did you mean?

• Water fountain

• Drinking fountain

• Garden fountain

• Classical fountain

• Roman Fountain

Fountain as a keyword is too broad. If you really meant you wanted information on garden fountains then a better search would have been to use the complete phrase garden fountain. Note that I have used inverted commas deliberately. Try this:

Go to Google and type garden fountain (no inverted commas) and look at the search results as of this days date (not the date you may be doing it) 370,000 SERPs.

Now go to Google and type garden fountain with inverted commas. This is what you would have got on the day I did it- 5,920 SERPs.

For the fun of it also go to Google and type garden fountains 7,680 SERPs

Finally do a Google search for Garden Fountains i.e. use of capital letters same as above 7,680 SERPs.

Lets take a closer look at what we got to help to understand this concept of keywords as far as search engines are concerned.

The first thing to understand when you type garden fountain without inverted commas is that you get a lot more results than when you typed the same phrase with inverted commas. Why?

The answer applies to most search engines. Simply typing two words like garden fountain tells Google to find all web pages that contain both the word garden and fountain on the same page it does not matter what order the words are in or even if they are far apart on the page.. They do not need to be next to each other.

On the other hand typing garden fountain means Google will only find those pages that contain the two words exactly as you typed them and there are always far less SERPs under these circumstances. Not only this the leading SERPs using inverted commas tend to be the leading SERPs without inverted commas but not always. This has major implications for us later.

The second important point is that typing garden fountain might bring up results that have no relevance to fountains in gardens. For example a page which read at the bottom of the garden was a drinking fountain could be a returned result for garden fountain with no inverted commas.

Capital letters in Google and all other search engines these days are compressed to lower case i.e. it does not matter whether you type in capitals or not.

Now of course most people who search the Internet do not know the differences but the ones who really are looking seriously do know it these are people who want to buy and who know what they really want. These people will and do use inverted commas for example in their searches. To narrow search results right down sophisticated searchers might use the phrase brass garden fountain. Lets try a search for this and see how much competition there is.

My goodness, can you believe it? no competition!

Finding the keywords real people use every day is one of the challenges that face prpffesional web designers i.e. those designers who offer their clients not just a website but a website that produces the desired results SALES.

More and more searchers these days use at least 2 and normally up to 4 words in a phrase. They have learned one word phrases deliver junk..

If you are going to follow my suggestion and become your own web designer you must place great emphasis upon this. It is not something to be treated lightly nor is it something you can finalize in a couple of hours.

Those web pages (SERPs) that appear on pages 1 and 2 of Google search engine results especially in highly competitive areas are probably there because the designers have chosen good keywords and used this and other information correctly.

Note that I said the designer chose and used the keyword in an optimized fashion ... optimized as required by a search engine and not necessarily by a human reader.

In the paragraph above I referred to web pages NOT websites. Google search engine does not find websites. It finds web pages. It is important to recognize this basic fact.

Fairly early on in my internet career I learned this basic keyword identification requirement. What I did not fully realize however was that it was highly unlikely that I would guess or think of the best keywords for my chosen subject. I also GROSSLY underestimated how many different keywords or phrases people were using when searching across my market niche and I was not aware of the importance of placing keywords in strategic parts of any web page to ensure they got priority attention from Google.

I hope by now you are convinced that keyword selection is important and not something nice to know The next sections will take you through the process of exploring and then finding the right keywords to use in your web design.

5.2. Starting your search for keywords and how to identify competition for each keyword

My very first website project was about water gardening. This project remains to this day unfinished in the sense that Im still discovering new keywords for use in this project. Whatever project you start in terms of what we are discussing here it is probably that it will never end unless you choose to ignore it.

I started as most people do by guessing at what I though important keywords relative to the project were and like everybody else I came up with the obvious single keywords like:

• Ponds

• Pumps

• Waterfalls

• Fountains

• Koi

• Aquatics

And many others of a similar type.

None of these however was much use as a good keyword because they were too general and made it more difficult for me to compete with other similar web pages. And in any case, as I later discovered, anybody typing a single word into a search engine is far away from any important buying decision. Such searchers are best referred to as tyre-kickers you remember when you had nothing to do and to relieve boredom you took to kicking your cars tyres just to make sure they were still there. Well thats about the same interest searchers have in you and your products when they type single keywords into the search box.

Nevertheless they were good starting points. Lets take the word ponds and build upon this by doing a bit of brainstorming. This is the kind of list I came up with (you can ignore any capitalization for the sake of search engines):

• Garden ponds

• Fish ponds

• Lily ponds

• Koi ponds

• Concrete ponds etc.

All contained the word ponds but were far more specific and probably were more like the phrases being used by real people searching the Internet for information and products associated with ponds.

I then did the same with the word pumps and came up with a list like the following:

• Submersible pumps

• Low voltage pond pumps

• Pond pumps

• Waterfall pumps

• Fountain pumps etc.

This list was becoming more useful BUT it was also becoming longer and longer.

Take note here: YOU DO NEED A LONG LIST OF KEYWORDS. If your keyword list is only 10 to 20 words you have done a pretty poor job of selecting important keywords. If you have 300 keywords then that is not too bad not good mind you.

Before the end of this book I will show you how to automate this process to remove some boredom from the exercise. At the risk of overkill I must stress this keyword selection process is critical to success.

Potentially every keyword is the basis for a separate web page. What? - 300 web pages you are saying

My answer is yes maybe you do want to do 300 web pages but not all at once. So dont be put off yet. All will become clear. One thing I promise however is the more web pages you have the more success you will enjoy. This is one more reason for being able to do web pages yourself.

If you asked a web designer to do a 300 page web for you he would want to charge you a fortune.

You've got your 300 keywords, what's next?

You must now select the best keywords (those you are going to focus on initially in order to get traffic from the search engines) from this list of 300. To be able to do this you need the correct answers to two questions for each keyword:

Question 1:

Are real people looking for this keyword and if so how many (referred to as POPULARITY)?

Question 2:

How much competition in terms of web pages (SERPs) found on a search am I facing for this single keyword (referred to as COMPETITION)?

Remember you are aiming to get to position 1 on page 1 for your future web page. You hope to lead the competitors on this keyword. Take a look at this next picture and especially the top right hand corner.

This image shows what is meant by competition

Notice that youll read results 1 10 of about 385,000 for gold fish ponds.

What this means is that Google in its database has found about 385,000 potential SERPs for the search gold fish ponds. However it is only displaying the first 10 because Google has judged these to be the most relevant youll also see that number 2 in this list of SERPs is a page from my website practical-water-gardens.com. In essence I have managed to out compete all but 1 of the 385,000 in order to get onto this first page of Google for this single search gold fish ponds.

I would like to illustrate another important point here that was touched upon earlier the search for gold fish ponds is not the same as the search for goldfish ponds. Take a look below the competition is much lower so theoretically it is easier to compete for the term goldfish ponds than gold fish ponds.

If the answer for any keyword is that lots of people are searching ( POPULARITY IS HIGH) and there are only a few competing websites (COMPETITION IS LOW) then you have found a very good keyword (maybe a gold mine in disguise) on which to focus a web page design. The brass garden fountain was one of these possibly but we only had half the story we knew there was very little competition. We did not know if it was popular.

To drive this point home here are two keywords from the early days of my water gardening project showing these two search terms garden pond designs and aquatic information:

01,760

For the term aquatic information nobody was looking. For the term garden ponds designs 48 people per day were looking on the search engines and there was hardly any competition.

The more people looking for your type of product/service/assistance who visit your web page then the greater is your chance of making that sale especially if the competition is on the low side. Finding keywords that people are using every day is thus an important objective at the start of any Internet project.

This concept of competition is easily measured and simple to understand. However its not enough to just know how competitive a keyword is we need to identify whether the market is worth competing in. Using the table above there would have been little to be gained by competing in a market for aquatic information

This second component is far more elusive and difficult to understand so the next section will delve into internet markets and what actually comprises a market in the sense of internet marketing using the search engines to drive traffic to markets we choose to participate in.

5.3. HOW TO ASSESS SIZE OF INTERNET MARKETS ACCURATELY & QUICKLY

We are all comfortable with the real world and the markets we participate in every day. If you as a consumer go into a fruit and vegetable store youll see all the fruit on a nice well laid out racked display.

Nicely laid fruit stall makes shopping easy, a pleasure and rewarding for both parties

This makes it easy to choose what you want in fact theres real method to these displays. They are always full And kept full. They are always showing the best of the fruit

The result of this is that you may just buy a bit more than you intended who would buy from an empty rack, or a badly displayed rack? And if those bananas really looked good and even though you intended to buy lemons you might just change your mind. Maybe get both.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

Shopping is easy if you have the luxury of seeing a range and being able to choose immediately by simple visual inspection.

On the Internet there is no single way to see everything in one place that makes choice easy and quick. In fact it is difficult to find exactly what you want because of the sheer choice you have, the extent of the competition and because you can only see one result at a time. As a result you quickly learn that the right choice of keyword is vitally important if you want to find what you want quickly and get a good deal.

The image below is of two apples . On the left a bright shiny red one. On the right a multi-colored not so shiny apple. Now conceptualize or imagine that you happened to be the worlds largest grower of the multi colored apples shown on the right. Imagine youd had a bumper crop and you wanted to sell the crop on the Internet but time was limited and that you really only wanted targeted buyers.

How would you go about finding those targeted buyers? I hope you agree promoting just apples would get you nowhere. And hoping people would find your type of apple by a casual apples search would be fruitless.

Somehow both you, as the seller, and the searcher, as the potential buyer, must meet.

You must both be operating in exactly the same market and this market is not a fruit or even an apple market it is far more specific than that.

Your market happens to revolve around a single type of apple called The Golden Delicious (the one shown on the right). If you can do a good enough job of creating a website with many pages about Golden Delicious apples and if the searcher happens to find one of these pages because the potential buyer knows he only wants Golden Delicious and thats all hes looking for then its probable that youll sell your whole crop.

If your website is only about apples in general or about how you are the worlds biggest and best apple farmer its unlikely youll sell even a single apple no matter how professionally your site is put together.

On the Internet these are not apples one is a shiny red sweet apple (on left), the other is a Golden Delicious apple

You cannot assume and act in a general fashion to succeed on the web. You have to be highly specific. Your website MUST be targeted to the highly specific Golden Delicious. In this context a SINGLE keyword Golden Delicious represents a total specific market.

From now on in this book a keyword is the direct equivalent to a specific market. For example small Golden Delicious is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT KEYWORD to large Golden Delicious but more important it is a completely different market to the one for large Golden Delicious.

This table below may make this a bit easier to understand.

Table showing number of people (how big the market is) for different keyword terms all related to Golden Delicious

The table tells me that 14 people are typing into the search engines the exact phrase golden delicious apples and 7 are typing the exact phrase picture of golden delicious apple i.e. they are looking for a picture of golden delicious apple. Since you are trying to sell Golden Delicious apples it would pay you to have a web page about pictures of golden delicious apples (NOT JUST A PICTURE of a golden delicious apple on any old web page).

Three people everyday are looking for golden delicious apple nutrition facts. I would therefore recommend to you that your website should definitely have a web page geared to nutrition of the Golden Delicious.

You can be reasonably certain of 2 things

> These people are only interested in Golden Delicious apples not any other type

> These people are not the same individuals

This means if you did not cover every one of these keyword terms in detail in your website you would NEVER attract all these market participants to your site.

To all intents and purposes every one of these keywords is a completely different market or sphere of operation. If you add together the number of searchers you have a pretty good appreciation of the total size of the Internet market for Golden Delicious and you know the EXACT size of the market for picture of golden delicious apple. It is predicted to be 6 per day.

Imagine if you could discover the market size for any keyword. Well you can. And easily and quickly and with good accuracy and for pennies.

However I have some sound advice for you before providing you with the most useful SEO tool available on the whole web. The advice is that you will only ever get the best out of this tool if you practice and exercise your brain first. The tool can substitute for a great deal and even a bit of brainpower but frankly it cannot do the really important work for you all that well that work is called thinking. So for the time being lets make an assumption together.

Lets just assume for a moment that you cannot afford to buy special keyword assistance software. Under these circumstances you will still be able to identify lots of keywords using your own personal capabilities and some free keyword tools available.

5.4 USING BRAINSTORMING TECHNIQUES TO DISCOVER MARKET NICHES (ALSO KNOWN AS KEYWORDS)

This technique relies quite simply in listing as many terms that you can think of without doing any evaluation whatsoever at the time of the idea this is done later. The more people involved in the brainstorm the better.

Remember in the brainstorming technique what are called lateral keywords will come up frequently. These will be vitally important factors in your final choice of targeted keywords.

An example of a lateral keyword using soccer as the overall keyword topic could be:

> David Beckham

> Manchester United

> Premier league and so on and so on.

Taking this point a bit further you might decide based upon your brainstorming technique to optimize a page for premier league soccer clubs.

Vertical keywords are the more obvious keywords like:

> soccer balls

> soccer boots

> soccer stadium and so on

Most of your competitors will get stuck in these vertical market niches which means you will be able to operate in far more lucrative areas with considerably less competition if you apply your brain and not just use tools.

Combining lateral and vertical keywords can add a great deal of value and provide lots of traffic to your optimized web page.

5.5 USING COMPETITORS WEBSITES

Many websites list their keywords in the meta tag section of their web page. It is simplicity itself to explore these until your heart is content. All that is required is to View Source as described earlier go to the Head section and copy and paste the keywords you find there.

If you decide to go this route do the manual brainstorm first so that you are not overly influenced by what you find that your competitor doing

5.6 USING FREE KEYWORD SEARCH TOOLS

Overture (now called Yahoo) is a pay per click search engine. This means companies actually agree to pay Overture if someone clicks on the SERP return corresponding to the selected keyword.

Overture publishes a list of search terms used by Overture searchers.

This is the Overture keyword suggestion tool and it could be a good time to look at it and give it a try. It will help you to understand a lot of what is coming.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

 In the example below we used the generic word ponds to see what came up.

The numbers indicate how many times the words pond or ponds was searched for on Overture during December 2002. Note the other terms containing pond(s) and the search frequency. This is useful information.

There are some drawbacks. The terms include both singular and plural terms and there is no indication of number of competitors although this can be discovered manually. The results are also only drawn from the Overture database which is not a popular search engine for general search purposes. Despite this it is an excellent starting point and it is free.

There is a rumour going the rounds that Overture intend to remove this tool so that it is only available to customers in future.

Despite the drawbacks Overture can be a very useful means of adding keywords to your manually derived list.

Overture UK provides a different keyword suggestion list to the one from the USA database. See below for the search for ponds and compare with that previously shown,

There are many tools available that use the Overture database as the source of their own output.

5.7 USING OTHER ENGINES TO HELP

Many search engines these days provide you with suggested terms or topics related to the search term you used so this can be an important source of new ideas to add to those derived from the other techniques mentioned.

5.8 ADDING TO YOUR LIST

Lets assume at this stage you have a long list of vertical keywords and you have also combined some lateral and vertical keywords to form what you think will be popular search terms. There are other ways to extend this list.

Assume you want to attract people who are looking to buy sheds

You can extend the list of keywords (keyword phrases) by adding the following types of words:

> Large .

> Small

> Wide .

> Wooden

> Building

> How to build ..

> Build .

> Erect

> Erecting ..

> Design

> Plan ..

> Planning

> Plural and/or singular variations

> Country, town, region, brand name, colors and so on

Using extension adjectives, verbs, adverbs and so on makes for an endless list. Look for variations on terms often used by serious searchers.

Think about it .

if you wanted to buy a large wooden shed in Boise, Idaho then this is exactly what you would or at least should type into Google.

5.9 SINGULAR AND PLURALS

In the world of search engines nothing is static forever. At this stage Google and most other search engines differentiate between plural and singular which means two web pages are needed to possibly rank highly for both terms.

To check whether any engine recognizes singular as well as plurals just go to the engine and type in both forms. If the number of results in both cases is the same then that engine treats singular and plural as the same keyword.

5.10 MISSPELLINGS

A wonderful source of keywords is common misspellings. To highlight this take a look at my own project for the word algae. Go to Google and type in algae and then type in algea and you will a lot of sites are designed for algea which is of course algae spelled wrongly either deliberately or by accident most by accident I think.

The same mistake is made by searchers about 30% of the time a searcher types algea. Knowing this means I can pick up those searchers who make spelling errors by specifically designing web pages for the incorrect spelling.

Think of the words that are commonly misspelled or spelled differently in different countries in your own sphere of interest. What about fibreglass, fiberglass, glassfibre, glassfiber (4 words all meaning the same and all searched for). Add these 4 terms to boats, for example, and immediately you have 4 web pages that can be optimized in order to capture the attention of all the searchers looking for this type of boat.

Creating a web page for this variation could hardly be easier all that is required is to find and replace the word in the original page and then publish it as new page. In practice I would suggest you use this method as a starting point only. Modify the page to ensure the page does not become snared by any duplicate content filter at play. This is important point major search engines already penalize pages considered to be duplicate content and more search engines will probably adopt this practice in future

There are many words like this. Go to dictionaries, thesaurus and so on. Google even has a tool to help you find these terms. One very common and very important differentiation is ..ise (UK spelling) versus ..ize (USA spelling) or .isation versus .ization .

5.11 USING CAPITAL LETTERS

Most search engines no longer recognize capital letters as being different to lower case letters.

5.12 COUNTRY SPECIFIC TERMS

This is a major source of keywords to discover. A good example from my own experience was the discovery of the keyword backyard that substitutes for garden in many situations in the USA. On the other hand it is hardly ever used in this gardening context in my own country and most other English speaking countries.

Another example of such a country specific term used often by English-speaking people in South Africa is the word veld which is an Afrikaans word meaning field literally but is also used as a synonym for countryside, open spaces and so on.

To discover these find a magazine (on or off-line) on your topic relating to the country you are targeting. You would also use this technique to discover terms peculiar to a niche topic.

5.13 LOCALIZED SEARCHERS

You have probably used Googles search within results tool. Take advantage of this tool as follows.

Where do you live?

Lets say you sell fly fishing rods and your website is not designed to be well ranked for this keyword on an international basis. However you do want those visitors in your own region because you are really not able to deliver further than 50 miles from your home town. You must make sure that these web visitors all see your site.

This is accomplished by making sure that the name of your town, region is on your web page. Once is possibly enough. You will probably rank number 1 for searches on fly fishing rods + wigan where Wigan is the name of your local town.

Most designers do not use this simple but effective technique. Put your town/region on every web page, along with anything else of this special or unique nature when it makes sense to the visitor and the search engine to do this.

5.14 USING YOUR LOGS TO DISCOVER KEYWORDS

Note: This section assumes you already have a website up and running so we are jumping ahead of ourselves a little because I advocate that a website should not be built before doing keyword research.

Many hosts provide good stats programs free of charge. Some of these programs with which I am familiar including Webalizer and Awstats produce web statistics that include a list of keywords used to find your website. These are goldmines go and dig.

Note: every host collects these statistics; they just dont necessarily make them available in a format easy to understand. It is possible to get log file analyzer programs to interpret the log files automatically produced however the best solution if you cannot get graphical stats from your host is quite simply to change hosts. Frankly you do not want to be working with such backward companies.

Take a look at the keyword report produced by one of my hosts for the month of May 2005 and you will immediately see the enormous benefit you can get from exploring your log files.

Source of SE referrer by keyword May 05

HOW ELSE CAN YOU USE THIS LOG GENERATED KEYWORD INFORMATION?

The data in the table plainly shows that this website is getting found a lot for the EXACT search term garden ponds. Now assume I was only on page 2 of the search engine results for this term. Imagine if I could optimize the site to such an extent I could get this web page onto page 1 and in the top 5 then my traffic for this single search term would increase enormously.

In practice what you often find is a search term that is giving you a few results yet when you type the phrase into the search engine you cannot find any results on the first 3 pages. This kind of information is a gold nugget because it is telling you that this term is probably highly searched for and that you have not created an optimized page for it. All that you have to do in many cases is to literally creature an optimized page and within weeks your traffic for this single phrase will increase.

Take note from the image above that in May 2005 this website was found on search engines 10,034 times for 4,870 different search phrases. This confirms the importance of keyword research and thinking like a customer.

5.15. HOW TO DECIDE ON WEBSITES STRUCTURE USING YOUR KEYWORDS

Use your keyword list to organize your website layout and content

Once you have completed your keyword research bearing in mind research and discovery never really stops its time to think about priorities and how and where to use them. The best way to illustrate this is to use a real example from my own experience.

One of my most important market niches is related to water gardens and all it entails fish ponds, algae control, pond pump selection, waterfalls and water features & fountains and so on.

Based upon my own keyword research and practical feedback from logs and other sources this overall topic of water gardening can be split into 9 sub categories.

These are shown in the pie chart below

LET ME EXPLAIN HOW I GOT THE DATA FOR THIS PIE CHART.

I collected all the actual searches for EXACT search terms over a period of time. By EXACT I mean that the phrase counted and recorded was the specific phrase typed into Google by the searcher. As an example I only counted the phrase pond pumps not a phrase containing the two words pond pumps as in garden pond pumps for example. This latter phrase would be considered a totally different search term or keyword.

Well over 1,000 specific keywords were identified and recorded.

This long list of keywords was then sorted manually into the 9 categories above using my personal interpretation of what the term referred to based upon my experience e.g. waterfall pump would be placed in the pumps category not waterfalls category.

The categories were then prioritized based upon the total searches for each category.

The table excludes any brand type keywords for example Hozelock Titan 2000 (this is a branded pond pump) or Oase pond vacuum. Of course these highly specific keywords are vitally important. It is however best not to let them contaminate the more general or generic type search keywords.

It should be noted that this list is extremely dynamic and meaningful results can only be obtained by measuring date over a month at least. Bear in mind also that this particular topic is a seasonal one there is considerably more activity during the northern hemisphere summer than in the cold winter months.

Example of some of the keywords in the water features category are shown in this abridged table below:

KeywordDaily Searches Google Onlygarden features246water features220water gardens205.

stainless-steel water feature66garden-ornament61water feature59slate water-features50indoor water features48water garden-features44water garden40.

stone garden ornament26water features in the garden25stone water-feature24wall water features24wall mounted water features22copper water features22.

contemporary water feature18outdoor water features16stainless steel water feature15pebble water feature15

Quite obviously from the above pie chart keywords related to ponds such as pond ideas, pond designs, landscaping ponds, pond liners, were searched for more than any other category (in fact almost a third of all highly targeted keyword searches revolved around ponds).

This provides a strong argument for creating a website devoted to questions, and needs around ponds only. This does not mean the site would not talk about pumps, fountains and other related topics. It simply means the site is focused first and foremost on ponds.

In fact there is a strong case for creating 9 different websites each dedicated to a separate category.

In my own case this is exactly how I started and it has paid handsome dividends for me. At the time I was not at all sure this was the right approach as distinct from creating one massive all encompassing website.

My advice will always be to analyze your long list of keywords this way and look for targeted logical categories rather than lump all topics into one large website. Then create as many websites as it takes to cover the overall topic logically and fully.

There is only one reason not to go this route and that is related to cost. However given that a domain registration costs less than $10 per year and excellent hosting is available for $60 per year or less there is no real cost disincentive.

Most website owners focus on large single websites which in my opinion not as good as creating multiple websites.

FURTHER USE OF KEYWORD RESEARCH

The list of keywords obtained as described also allows a logical choice of website layout to be made. You would for example using the tabular data above probably make the home page of a water features site focus heavily on

> Water feature(s)

> Water garden(s)

After all the combination of these few words would potentially attract a large number of daily visitors.

The data also allows keywords to be organized into logical sub categories such as

> types of water features (e.g. slate, stone, stainless steel, copper)

> locations for water features (e.g. indoor, outdoor, patio, wall mounted)

> themes (e.g. fantasy, natural, large, small, tabletop)

> care (e.g. cleaning, emptying, winter care, repair, pump selection)

The ultimate objective for you as the owner of the website is to eventually create a website with many pages where each page covers an important searched-for keyword and each page is able to be accessed easily through correct linking structures on the website.

To ensure that you create well constructed, laid out websites that will cater to searchers there is no substitute for this kind of keyword work. In fact without this research you can almost certainly be guaranteed to be disappointed in your website. Ask yourself a simple question how is it possible to construct a website geared to a targeted audience without knowing and organizing the keywords real people are using everyday to find useful information and products? Yet this is how the vast majority of websites start their life ... with no such critical information.

5.16.MAKING KEYWORD (MARKET SIZE) DISCOVERY EASY, QUICK & PROFITABLE

How big is the market I am targeting?

Big markets offer big opportunities. Smaller markets generally offer less competition.

In either case it is important to know as much as possible about the market you intend to operate in. Thus we need to discover how popular all those keywords weve collected are this is the best indication well get of market size.

I know only one way of estimating market size for any product or service on the Internet. Quite simply I need to find out how many people are looking for that product or service every day. But thats impossible isnt it? No, but it is necessary to have access to all the results of the search engine queries used every day. If you cannot get this then you need the next best thing which is an estimate of the number of daily search engine queries for every search engine keyword.

There is a most marvelous bit of Internet software run by an UK company. Unless you have been involved in search engine techniques and optimization projects you would have difficulty finding it and you have probably never heard of it. The site is devoted to keyword analysis in total. The software is called Wordtracker. Here is a screen shot of the options page:

Wordtracker captures search engine queries spotted by two meta crawlers every day. It keeps the results for the last 60 days inside its own large database (contains 373,000,000 entries at June 2005). Using accurate mathematical predictions the program is then able to provide a reliable estimate of how many times that query will be entered on all the various search engines every day. Isnt this just what we are looking for? It is of course. This is how popularity or market size is determined.

THIS IS HOW WE ASSESS IF THE MARKET IS BIG OR SMALL FOR OUR KEYWORD.

Wordtracker also makes available at all times the most popular keywords used on the Internet every day. As I write this heres the top 30 searched for terms (this list exclude adult words).

Imagine if you could design a great website about Carmen Electra (not recommended since youll almost certainly cannot compete effectively in areas like this) as the important keyword and imagine if you could occupy number 1 spot on Googles first page. You would get a heck of a lot of traffic to your web page. Others would love to advertise on your page then and pay you for the privilege.

Lets take a breath at this stage and review what we know and hopefully agree on:

> keyword selection is critically important

> we need to find lots of relevant keywords

> single words are generally poor keywords to use

> how to assess if there is a lot of competition for our selected keywords

> we now know how to determine popularity or market size if we prefer

> that by combining popularity with competition we can select the very best keywords

> this can be a heck of a lot of work

> we have found a wonderful tool called Wordtracker that can do almost all of the above work for us albeit at a cost

5.17 EXACTLY WHAT CAN I DO WITH WORDTRACKER SOFTWARE?

Wordtracker is not free but it is not very expensive and you cannot buy it outright. You can hire it for a week, even a day at a time. There is a free trial with limited capability but worth getting. If you really are serious and want to benefit buy 1 week minimum. Youll probably graduate to full time use if youre like us.

Internet failure is much more expensive than using Wordtracker. I am a Wordtracker convert.

A question you should always ask a potential web designer is do you use Wordtracker? If the designer is unsure then do re-consider his usefulness to your marketing effort. At the very least your designer should be prepared to learn basic SEO techniques and use the best tools available. Wordtracker is undoubtedly the best.

By the way this is a unique program. There is no competition for Wordtracker worth talking about. Overture (now Yahoo) and other pay per click programs do have a keyword assistance page that is useful to a beginner but I am talking in this book to serious users who need to get on the right path immediately. The Overture tool is based upon their search engine only and does not give any indication of competition. Nor does it distinguish between single and plural. It is much better to use the Wordtracker free trial although Overture search is certainly not a waste of time it can be very useful.

Many companies offer keyword tools with most being based on the Overture database.

I shudder to think what grave errors and wasted time and money I would have made in my project had I not discovered Wordtracker and learned how to use it well.

DISCOVER AS MANY KEYWORDS AS YOU LIKE

Wordtracker as a program is split into various parts. The first part allows you to build as long a list of meaningful keywords as you like. The starting point for example would be ponds.

I type ponds intoz the relevant section of Wordtracker. After a few seconds it gives me 300 possible keyword/keyphrase options to consider for this single word. Here are a few examples that I actually used.

• water garden ponds

• indoor ponds

• pond pumps

To press home the importance of this program I would like to use backyard ponds as the example. In my own country we hardly ever talk about backyards (backgardens yes but not backyards) let alone backyard ponds. On the other hand the American public use this word a great deal. By not recognizing the importance of this word I would have missed out a large chunk of targeted web searchers. Every day 111 people search for backyard ponds. Every day 52 people search for backyard waterfalls and so on.

When I had got enough synonyms for ponds I moved onto waterfalls and then pumps and then fountains and so on until I had amassed a great number of potential keywords.

I saved the ones I believed to have genuine relevance to my project for the next step.

This discovery feature alone makes Wordtracker worth every cent. But the best is still to come.

RANK THE POPULARITY OF EACH KEYWORD

Wordtracker indicates market size or keyword popularity. All I have to do is tell it to review my saved list of keywords. Lo and behold seconds later it tells me that in the last 60 days X people searched their database for that particular keyword and on that basis it could be confidently expected that across all search engines Y numbers of people were typing the keyword into one or other search engine every day on average. It is assumed this will continue until changed by the next set of Wordtracker analyses which are done every day. For seasonal businesses the change can be dramatic. For example when I rechecked all my keywords when summer in the Northern hemisphere was over the rate of search for some words had fallen dramatically. Seasonal behavior by searchers is just another reason why search engine optimization work never stops.

Now this is exciting stuff. Cant you see the possibilities of this? Imagine what you (and precious few others) can now do.

You have probably realized this but let me emphasize it. If your keyword is garden ponds then this keyword also covers anyone searching for just the word ponds or just the word garden and it is possible that you will pick up potential customers who are using these basic keywords only.

5.18 COMPARE MARKET SIZE WITH AMOUNT OF COMPETITION USING KEI

KEI is the next helpful part of Wordtracker.

Not only does Wordtracker identify popularity for you but it saves you hours of work by combining the competition for the same keyword in different search engine databases for you at the same time.

KEI is a phrase coined by Sumantra Roy a well known SEO (search engine optimizer) and used by Wordtracker. It means Keyword Effectiveness Indicator and is the result of mathematically combining popularity with competition to give an overall impression of the relative importance of the different keywords. For example is it better to focus on higher popularity and higher competition or lower popularity and lower competition?

KEI assists you to understand this. Beware however in using this as an absolute measure. Here is where your own knowledge and feeling must also play a role. Do you want volume or quality? and you can also try for both. When you have experience of web keyword design and success you can manipulate KEI to assist you in keyword choice.

THIS IS WHAT WORDTRACKER DOES FOR YOU

Wordtracker quite simply takes a great deal of guesswork and slog out of Internet market research. It is a major secret to becoming successful on the Internet. It is the only true and quick way to make meaningful Internet market research conclusions. Let me summarize:

> Wordtracker does a better job of identifying relevant keywords or market niches than youll ever do without it

> Wordtracker saves you dramatic amounts of time

> Wordtracker deters you from heading in the wrong direction and creates the information that will allow you to correctly structure your web design.

> Wordtracker indicates the on-line market size of any market niche you choose

> Wordtracker identifies weaknesses in the competition by providing a correlation between popularity (market size) and level of competition

> Wordtracker allows you to discover semantically related search terms that would not be obvious to you you may not yet appreciate this but this is one of the most powerful uses of Wordtracker.

If you want to sort out good designers from bad ask one simple question ask the designer how often he uses Wordtracker. Most will never have heard of it never mind use it on an ongoing basis.

To the best of my knowledge Wordtracker is the single most important software tool any web designer can have in his possession. Use it properly and you can guarantee yourself some number 1 positions on Googles first page of SERPs. You will find it relatively easy to get on the first 3 pages somewhere. No. 1 is always tough for competitive phrases and so dont fret too much about these. Find the less competitive niches and fully exploit them.

Whether you use Wordtracker or not you need to organize your keywords using a spreadsheet. Wordtracker allows you to export direct to Excel.

The table below is an extract from a Wordtracker search for the keyword garden pond

The column predict refers to a forecasted estimate based upon the past 60 days actual data of the number of daily searches for that particular exact term (by exact is meant searching using inverted commas around the term in the search box see image below).

Exact search uses inverted commas

So for garden ponds its forecasted that 170 daily searches will occur in total on all major search engines over next number of days.

Now Wordtracker always presents you with great clues on where to find other relevant keywords. Take a look a bit further down the table and youll see that water garden pond supplies is going to be searched for 63 times per day. If you sell pond supplies you would be interested in finding out more so lets do a search for pond supplies as shown below

You might now decide to drill down on the market niche for koi pond. Heres the result

Immediately you can see that koi pond filters are frequently looked for. What about other pond filters? Wordtracker has the answer by the way note difference between pond filter and pond filters in plural form. More people search for pond filters.

Wordtracker has shown you the size of each market niche in the various tables. By allowing Wordtracker to take you to the next stage it will relate the competition to the market niche size. If we do this for the pond filter search we get this collective and comprehensive information for Google search engine only shown below (you can do this same search on Wordtracker for a range of search engines and not just Google)

This table shows how many web pages in the Google index will be returned for the exact search (i.e. inverted commas) for each phrase. Take a look at the phrase build your own biological pond filter there is NO competition and to prove this take a look at this picture below ..

What this means in practice is that if you build a simple web page about how to build your own biological pond filter in the way we advocate and as youll see later youll probably be number 1 page 1 on Google and if you take a look at Yahoo youll certainly be on the first page too.

This book is not about how to use Wordtracker this is the subject of a complete book in its own right. You are encouraged to explore this software in depth and youll soon realize how indispensable it truly is.

Its worth repeating youll improve your SEO success rate by factors of hundreds by using Wordtracker.

At this stage using our own brains, magazine research and Wordtracker we have a long list of targeted keywords representing a wide range of related market niches. Wordtracker has also allowed us to prioritize in terms of market size, market competitiveness or a middle ground between the two (assisted by the KEI calculation). We have kept all these keywords in a spreadsheet so that they can be sorted, shuffled into relevant sub-categories and organized to our hearts content. Were now in a position to think of starting a website and picking a domain name.

5.19 PICKING A DOMAIN NAME

In my mind theres no doubt that a domain name such as gardenponds.com or garden-ponds.com is excellent and far better than elaborate, catchy or a brand name sites related to garden ponds. The reasons for my thinking are

* It certainly helps a little to have important keywords in a domain name in terms of search engine optimization

* It certainly helps a searcher no matter where in the world they come from to understand the contents of the website long before even seeing it

One of the top garden pond related websites is vnwg.com this is meaningless to anybody who does not know what these initials stand for. Apart from spelling simplicity there is no advantage to this domain name for either search engine optimization or the uninformed garden pond individual searcher.

Dont go looking for those catchy, apparently clever cool domain names. Come down to earth and find one that is meaningful to the content of your site and to the searcher and one that will maybe assist you a little bit in your search engine efforts too. Heres a few of my domain names they have proven their value.

* Pond-pumps.com

* Practical-water-gardens.com

* Clean-garden-ponds.com

* Garden-pond-plants.com

Use hyphens to make the domain name easier to read by humans for search engines that can parse long strings the hyphen is not important.

This logic relating to domain names also carries through to naming files. If you have a website about ponds called www.winter-ponds.com and one of the pages (a file) is about water heaters then water-heaters would be a good file name. The complete URL would then look like

http://www.winter-ponds.com/water-heaters.html or http://www.winter-ponds.com/water_heaters.html (second example uses underscore _ instead of hyphen in file name)

For both search engines and humans this is perfect.

A little bit later in the book well come to the best places to find and register domain names. For now well stick with keywords and how to use them to plan websites.

5.20 INTRODUCTION TO KEYWORDS AND TITLES

It is possible but not easy to rank highly on search engine results pages using only the keyword approach to web design.

However in highly competitive arenas you have to make sure that your web is made popular with respect to other websites using link structures to be covered shortly.

This combination of linking approach along with keyword analysis, and web page structuring is what gives you page 1 slot 1 success on the search engines. This chapter will also introduce you to important search engine thinking

Apart from the actual search engine designers/managers no-one knows exactly how any search engine works. These inner workings or algorithms are top secret for deliberate and obvious reasons. Some search engines are better than others because their search technology is better. Despite the secrets a great deal of information has been gathered to allow good assumptions to be made.

Anything I present in these next few paragraphs is therefore very educated guesswork. But by the time you have finished reading you will I am quite sure agree with what I say in terms of the usefulness of the information to sell products successfully on the net.

A search engine is only as good as its results. If a search engine continuously returns inadequate results to its searchers it will die (as did Alta Vista). It will die because it will no longer attract advertisers or any other source of income because people will stop using it.

Conversely good search engines will garner more and more market share because they will provide their customers with what the customer wants namely relevant results or SERPs.

6 years ago Google was almost unknown. Today (June 2005) it accounts for up to 50% of all search engine query results and is synonymous with search. There is no guarantee that this will remain the case especially as the other major player Yahoo has made major improvements over the last 12 months and recently MSN entered the fray.

5.21 GOOGLE HABITS

When a new website is recognized by Google for the very first time either by direct submission or because it has found the new site via a link on an existing Google site it examines that site in some detail in a micro second. It also saves a copy of the complete page. It places the information in a database. This page becomes 1 of more than 8 billion in Googles database (and growing daily).

When you or I search Google it is not a search of the web as most of us believe. It is a search of Googles own database (that is why it is so quick!).

If your web page is not in the Google database you will never be found on Google searching no matter how good your site.

Google completely reviews its own database a number of times a year and makes other less radical changes on a daily basis. The major changes that take place are these days referred to by the names of hurricanes because of the damage they can wreak on highly ranked websites. The most famous (infamous) was the Florida update in November 2004.

You can imagine what a job it must be to re-arrange 8 billion web pages just because you (and many thousands or millions like you) submitted a web page.

Google does not use as a matter of routine any human search mechanism to judge the worthiness of a site but it does use human intervention for quality control (it pays between $10 and $20 per hour to these human reviewers to look out for spam of any kind. Google encourages the reporting of spam.

The question Google no doubt asks itself every day is how can my Google machine think more like a human being in order to assess the relevance of a web page from a human beings point of view. This is Googles ongoing daily challenge and must be stressed and re-stressed.

Google has one main aim and that it to find a way to behave like a human at computer breakneck speed so that its customers get a relevant search result, which prompts them to keep coming back because at every visit they see a Google ad.

5.22 KEYWORDS AGAIN WHAT YOU READ BELOW IS CONJECTURE NOT FACT

Understanding and recognizing the use of keywords is one way Google can infer what a web page is about. It can never truly know and is why search results are never perfect.

Let me try to really make this obvious using Good Cheddar Cheese as an example.

If the Title of your web page was good cheddar cheese and nothing else then Google at this stage must assume your web page will be about good cheddar cheese that was the TITLE and was the first thing Google saw on inspecting your web page code.

If Google cannot find a single repetition of the phrase good cheddar cheese in the rest of your web page then Google will not be convinced your web page is about good cheddar cheese. Think of Google becoming somewhat confused. However rather than waste time trying to discover what the web page is really about and because Google is a very busy machine Google says this site is not an important site about good cheddar cheese so let me put the SERP on page 999 out of harms way.

This is a very simplified description but is akin to what happens in practice.

In the early days of the search engines the clever SEOs knew that search engines could be fooled this way. Using this knowledge a website would be titled (do you know what title means in this context?) good cheddar cheese and every second word/phrase on the page was good cheddar cheese like the following perhaps:

GOOD CHEDDAR CHEESE

Good cheddar cheese is really good cheddar cheese. Good cheddar cheese is made by good cheddar cheese makers. These good cheddar cheese makers are good at making good cheddar cheese.

Good cheddar cheese is really good cheddar cheese. Good cheddar cheese is made by good cheddar cheese makers. These good cheddar cheese makers are god at making good cheddar cheese.

Good cheddar cheese is really good cheddar cheese. Good cheddar cheese is made by good cheddar cheese makers. These good cheddar cheese makers are god at making good cheddar cheese. Good cheddar cheese is really good cheddar cheese. Good cheddar cheese is made by good cheddar cheese makers. These good cheddar cheese makers are god at making good cheddar cheese. Good cheddar cheese is really good cheddar cheese. Good cheddar cheese is made by good cheddar cheese makers. These good cheddar cheese makers are god at making good cheddar cheese.

Good cheddar cheese is really good cheddar cheese. Good cheddar cheese is made by good cheddar cheese makers. These good cheddar cheese makers are god at making good cheddar cheese.

To buy good cheddar cheese at highly inflated prices click here

The owner of such a site would get a lot of visitors looking for good cheddar cheese to his site because such writing did enable a web designer to get a page to rank very highly on SERPs.

Search engines of course got wise very quickly and started to reject sites having an over statement of the same word on them. Annoyed visitors probably alerted Google to this spamming technique. The point is it worked because of the lack of human intervention to examine the site.

Now if say a web page was 600 words in total and the concentration or occurrence of the keyword good cheddar cheese was about 3, 4 maybe 5% and the Title was good cheddar cheese and also the heading on the page contained good cheddar cheese then the chances would be good that the page was really about good cheddar cheese.

Most search engines work this way with many other refinements of course.

The point is very simple and very clear. Your web page will have difficulty achieving high ranking if it is not organized (optimized is the preferred word) for a keyword. However sheer weight of incoming links can overpower the benefits of keywords.

TITLE PROBABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT SINGLE ASPECT ON ANY WEB PAGE (SKIP THIS AT YOUR PERIL)

Take a look at this picture below and tell yourself what you think the title is in the context of the present discussion or at least point to the TITLE.

Find the Title

I am embarrassed to admit that it was quite a few weeks before I realized what was meant by Title in the context of web marketing using search engines and this is even after reading Ken Evoys 1,200 pages of MYSS.. it was not Kens problem. I was the totally guilty party. I skimmed that section. I assumed Title was my traditional view of title on a page.

The Title of this web page is cheddar cheese.

Just to make this clear look at this image again and specifically at the very top left hand corner. The Title is shown in white on a blue background just before the words Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The page Heading which says The History of Cheddar Cheese is not the Title in the contect of SEO.

To summarize Google and all other search engines place considerable emphasis upon keywords and the correct use of them in terms of web page design it is one of the ways it knows what the web page is about. It is not the only way and maybe even not the best way as you will see later.

This point is critically important.

WHERE IS THE TITLE LOCATED ON A PAGE A BIT OF HTML NEEDED HERE?

Let me use the following screen shot to further emphasize the importance of the Title and insertion of your main keyword in it and how you can change it in practice. Below is a search for the phrase Britney Spears. Notice how all the top results have Britney Spears in the Title and most have it in the important text returned by Google to provide the searcher with information on the contents of the website.

If you do nothing else make sure your main keyword is in the TITLE.

To find and edit the Title you need to look at the code behind a web page. The Title is in fact one of 3 critically important Tags appearing in the head section of a web page. The head section is information that is seen by search engines but not seen by casual searchers to put it plainly and simply. What the searcher sees on a web page is information placed in the body section.

This is how the code of a blank web page looks (i.e. before adding any information to it)

The < and > are tag markers so the <head> tag means this is the start of the head section and the </head> means this is the end of the head section. <body> and </body> means the start and end of the body section respectively. Anything typed between the head tags will not be seen on the web page.

Take a look at this code where Ive typed some information after the start <body> tag namely This website is about good cheddar cheese. The <p> and </p> tags are just code for start and end of paragraph

This code produces a web page and this is what you would see on the web page

Now look what happens to the code when I create a Title tag for this web page. The text I typed is in the head section between <title> and </title> . The Title of my web page is Tonys Good Cheddar Cheese .

And the web page created by this code looks like this

It hasnt changed. You dont see what Ive typed into the head section and so the look is identical to the previous one.

Because the Title tag is not visible most web designers totally ignore it yet the TITLE is the single most important part of any web page and the lack of a sensible one is the reason why so many sites will never get found on a search engine.

Take a look at these 3 snapshots from the website of Woolworths South Africa in June 2005

1. The Home Page

2. The Food & Wine Page

3. The Gifts Page

Now take a look at the Title for each page . Its Woolworths every time. To the search engines these 3 pages are all about the same thing Woolworths, not wine, not gifts.

This is a massive mistake and costs this company many thousands of visitors that are lost to their competitors because these web pages CANNOT be found on the search engines because they lack a simple page-targeted Title tag.

What a crying shame this illustrates the absolute ignorance of many companies and web designers of what is important. Yet these same companies have spent millions on developing an on-line presence.

The good news is that such miserable failures allow individuals, like you and me, to out-compete companies like this.

TITLE LENGTH

Studies have been completed to attempt to identify how important the length of the Title might be in terms of site optimization without conclusive results. Each search engine imposes a limitation of its own in terms of length of course. You will notice long titles are cut off in Google results if you exceed the allowed limit which is 64 characters (like the 4th result in the Britney Spears SERPs above).

The SEO would generally prefer longer Titles because more use of keywords can be made. The search engine possibly would prefer shorter Titles because it becomes more meaningful and to the point

Is plain and simple good cheddar cheese a better Title than Taste good cheddar cheese?

It possibly is since the second and longer Title is broader in scope or context.

If the intention is to optimize ONE page for a range of keywords then a longer Title is probably justified. However I would always advise the use of a separate page for any keyword unless there is very little competition for the keywords.

TITLE AND STOP WORDS

Many words in the English language are considered irrelevant by search engines purely by their frequency of use and reason for use. These words are called STOP words or STOPLIST words. Typical STOP words are the, or, and , if, but and similar. There are about 600 I believe.

When it comes to TITLES and LINKS using keywords avoid the use of STOP words.

Your Title might not appear quite grammatically correct but the search engine and 99% of all surfers will not worry about this.

TITLE - POSITIONING AND FREQUENCY OF KEYWORD

The consensus is that the closer the keyword is to the beginning of the Title the better. Now if short Titles are used then the keyword phrase can be the Title like Good Cheddar Cheese.

I believe this the best approach although I prefer to use the multiple keyword in Title approach with a short title there can be no doubt that this is what the page is about assuming the same keyword is used properly in the body of the web page. There is no dilution of the keyword.

But we dont know so we need to find out? Google will not tell us of course so we test and test.

Once again you can only do successful testing if you are in total control of your own web pages. Being in control of your own web pages (this is real marketing work) is important management work and not something to be delegated to a web designer.

5.23 OTHER VITAL TAGS WHERE KEYWORDS ARE CRITICALLY IMPORTANT

KEYWORD META TAG

Most website owners have heard of meta tags and know this is a location where keywords reside. Most of these same website owners and designers also believe that locating a whole range of keywords in the meta tag is all that is required to satisfy search engines. As a result and to hedge bets this meta tag literally gets stuffed with keywords. Heres an example from a cell phone web page.

<meta name="Keywords" content="cell phone accessories, cellular phone accessories, cell phone accessories, cell phone battery, cell phone charger, battery charger, travel charger, cell phone leather case, cell accessories, phone accessories, cellular accessories,accessory,cell phone accessory, cellular phone accessory, cell phone accessory, cell accessory, phone accessory, cellular accessory, cell phone auto charger, cell phone car charger, cellular phone charger, cellular phone battery, cell phone case, cell phone headset, cell phone holster, Jabra Headset, Plantronics headset, bluetooth headset, blue tooth headset, cell phone handsfree, travel charger, travel battery charger, Lithium battery, cell phone battery charger, cell phone data cable,leather case,body glove,carrying case,holster, phone accessories, PHONE ACCESSORIES,battery charger">

Ask a simple question how can a single web page cover all these topics and be meaningful?

In the early days of SEO this technique of keyword stuffing was used to fool search engines. People just loaded the meta tag with words and because this tag was important to search engines at one time it was reasonably easy to get an undeserved ranking. The result of this spamming was that most major search engines stopped using this tag (for ranking purposes) quite some time ago or they retained usage but were more analytical.

Ananzi by the way certainly does use this tag for web ranking and its vital that you always sue it in a the correctly structured way.

It was easy to prove this a word like fgthysfdt would be added to the meta tag but not to the page. A search could then be made for the word fgthysfdt and no web page would be returned. At the same time another search for a phrase actually written into the page would result in the page appearing on the SERPs.

However properly used this tag will always be important and so long as the contents are relevant to the page there can be nothing wrong with including numerous keywords. However to use keywords that do NOT appear on the page itself is risking censure of some kind.

Heres what a meta tag could look like for the above cheese web page. Note that just like the Title tag this tag is not seen and tends to get insufficient attention (after all nobody sees it BAD mistake) because its in the head section

THE DESCRIPTION META TAG

This tag also appears in the head section as you can see here.

All that remains to be seen on the web page by the searcher is

Some search engines place the description tag on the SERPs page just below the Title and they also, sometimes at least, might use the information in the description tag to rank the page in the SERPs.

Irrespective of whether it is used for ranking or not it is most advisable that it is always created and written to include the important and relevant keywords for that particular page. The most important reason for doing this is that it must also appeal to the searcher who may see the description you wrote reproduced on the SERPs page. The description must appeal to and encourage the searcher to click on your entry before those other entries around your result on the same SERPs page.

Heres an example that is a poorly written keyword stuffed web page meta description tag. It has no appeal to any person who may see it on a SERPs page.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="CELL PHONE ACCESSORIES Mall-Cellular phone accessory like cell phone battery,travel charger,leather case, car charger,auto charger,data cable, Jabra headset, Plantronics headset, headset,holster,leather case from $5.95! Cell phone accessory for cell phones. Wireless phone accessory store for cellular phones by Audiovox,Kyocera,LG,Mitsubishi,Nokia,Motorola,Nextel,Panasonic,Qualcomm,Samsung,Sanyo,Siemens,Sony Ericsson,Verizon,Cingular,Sprint PCS and T-Mobile">

In summary there are 3 very important tag uses for the keyword(s) these must all be relevant to the actual page content. It makes complete sense therefore to write these tags only after the web page has been written. Later in this book youll get a look at an amazing bit of South African Internet software that will automatically create relevant keyword rich tags for you for a single page or even a complete website of thousands of web pages in seconds.

* Title tag most critical

* Description tag very important and especially with respect to the person you want to attract to your page from those search engines that use this tag for the SERPs pages.

* Keyword meta tag less important to Google but still very important in general

This section covered the use of keywords in the hidden head section. Now we can move on to using keywords in the body section.

5.24 KEYWORDS POSITIONING IN BODY TEXT

If you were looking for something you really wanted on the Internet you would probably identify in your own mind important characteristics. Consider the following:

> You want cheese.

> You want cheddar cheese no other kind

> You want English cheddar cheese only

> The English cheddar cheese must be yellow not white.

Because you really want to find English yellow cheddar cheese and because you are an experienced searcher you would type a full descriptive phrase perhaps the following into the search box of Google or other search engine:

English yellow cheddar cheese.

On the assumption that I sell English yellow cheddar cheese and place importance on this phrase I design my website to make sure that the serious visitor is in no doubt that is what my web page is about. So:

My web page heading might be: English yellow cheddar cheese, the tastiest, freshest English yellow cheddar cheese as judged by 1 million customers

My web page SUB-heading might read: English yellow cheddar cheese for the cheese connoisseur. English yellow cheddar cheese is vacuum packed for shipping world wide at no cost

My body text might look something like this:

Blabla bla bla English yellow cheddar cheese Blabla ble bla lkjleble bla ble bllraa bla lebla Blablaew ble blstra Bleble blila ble albla bla lebla English yellow cheddar cheese.

Klokj ucna kskdnki asdjkkljk cheddar cheese adiho asdho sgh sdoas sahioa hdlodo. Askdonad English yellow cheddar cheese. Raskdo asdjasdj askld duiomj

Aki;p kalf cheddar cheese Askdon treys English yellow cheddar cheese.

It is no coincidence that Google will also probably conclude this site is about English yellow cheddar cheese.

This is the essence of web page design for keywords. Heres another more normal example. What do you think this page below is about what is the targeted keyword phrase?

..

A Water Softener Is More Than Just Useful In The Home

Try a water softener ... be kind to your skin, brighten up your laundry, make your hair appear silkier and make cleaning easier for yourself. Treat yourself to a water softener today.

What's a Water Softener?

A water softener is essentially a tank with an inlet and outlet water connector that is full of very small solid coated plastic beads known as ion exchange resins. Alternatively zeolite (a complex naturally occurring product) can be coated and used in water softener cartridges.

How do I know if my water is hard and if I might need a water softener?

If when you wash your hands it is difficult to get a nice lather then the water is probably hard and will benefit from a water softener. If you see scale build up in kettles and pipes then the water is probably hard. When water feels a bit slimy then it is very soft and in this case a water softener is a waste of money. Calcium and magnesium ions naturally present in water create hardness and too much creates hard water as described.

Hard water makes washing less efficient and as such clothes and laundry generally can look dull and jaded ... and I am sure at some stage you have seen that line of scum around the bath when you empty the bath water. Water softeners prevent this happening.

How does a water softener work?

The small plastic beads or zeolite inside the body of a water softener are covered with sodium ions. The reason that the contents of the water softener is called an ion exchange unit is that as water passes through the water softener the sodium ions on the surface of the resin exchange places with the magnesium and calcium ions present in the incoming water .... i.e. the magnesium and calcium stick to the surface of the resin and release the sodium. The sodium that was displaced on the zeolite or beads in the water softener  leaves the unit.

The water is then said to have been softened .... it is the presence of excess calcium and magnesium ions (or salts) that makes water hard. Sodium does not precipitate (this is how scale and bath tub rims appear) like calcium and magnesium salts ... sodium stays in solution and does not affect washing at all.

Water softener units have been used in industry for many years yet are still relatively new as home appliances.

Does the resin in a water softener need frequent replacing?

No. The resin once it has lost all its sodium (having been replaced with magnesium and calcium) it is easily regenerated using common salt. Potassium chloride can also be used but would normally be too expensive.

How do I specify a water softener for my home? ... here are a couple of examples to show you how specifications are normally noted

Model: WS-10

* Dimensions: 2-5/8'' x 9-3/4'', (67 mm x 248 mm)

* Recommended Flow Rate: 0.50 gpm, (1.9 lpm)

* Capacity: 750 Grains as CaCO3

Notice the water flow rate requirement for the water softener and amount of calcium that can be removed before the water softener resin has to be regenerated ... these are important.

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5.25 WEB PAGES MUST BE ABOUT THE SEARCHERS NEED READ KEYWORD

When a visitor clicks a link to your web page he or she (about 55% are male in USA) must quickly see what the site is about and your heading must do this and preferably the heading should closely match the Title text used and seen in the SERPs results in this way there is an immediate link made by the searcher between the need (the search term used) and the result (your web page).

Forget your company name and how proud you are of your logo and artistic skills. Chances are the visitor has never heard of your company name and could not really care less at this stage of the proceedings.

This is a good reason by the way NOT to put your company name in any web page TITLE.

Use that first screen to tell the customer that your web page is about satisfying THEIR NEED. Attract the customer, forget the company pride for now! It is difficult enough as it is to sell to a searcher. Many will never go beyond the first screen. They might if you have what they are looking for. Just compare your own behavior when searching for confirmation of this type of behavior.