One of the key skills you need to develop when undertaking search engine optimization is the ability to identify and choose keywords that your customers are going to use, or should I say likely to use, to visit your website or search for it. . engine. There are many great tools out there that will help you find the right keywords, but keep in mind to always test the results you get because there are bugs in some of these tools that can cost you time and money. I want to go through a series of steps to prove you have the right keywords.

There are a variety of tools you can use to determine which keywords will be most appropriate for your market, some of them are free, some you have to sign up for and some you have to pay for. Tools include –

1.Word Tracker

2.Google AdWords

3. Opening

4. Free keywords

5. Your website session logs

6. Yahoo Advertising

7. Keyword Finder

8. Keyword Elite

9. Good keywords

10. Competitor Websites

Before investing in the keywords you have found, always check if the keyword is as popular as the resources indicate in that search.

Why?

I recently had a situation where a keyword we found “advanced estate planning techniques” was supposed to get 250 hits a day from Google. We got this information from a variety of different sources, however we found that this was not the case, in fact those keywords prior to writing this article actually only get 2-5 hits per day.

One of the biggest lessons my team and I learned from this was to make sure that we run a keyword test on pay-per-click programs before buying any domain that uses the keywords to ensure that the keywords really get the job done. traffic that keyword tools tell you. The way my team accomplishes this is that we will create the sales pages for the product or service that we want to sell and test it on the key search engine that we want to optimize the new website to use one of our existing websites.

For example, if we know that a certain keyword will get the most traffic on Google, we will probably use AdWords to prove that the traffic really exists. If we knew that Yahoo was the top traffic source for the keywords, then we would use Overture.

Typically, we’ll test keywords for 2-3 days. Longer tests may be necessary, but two or three days is usually a good indicator. Once we’re sure the keywords are getting the volume of traffic we’re looking for, we’ll stop advertising, secure the domain name, and then deploy our products to that domain and optimize web pages for that product or service. This ensures that we don’t get caught in a situation that we’ve been in the past, where we have a domain name that contains keywords that are totally useless.

The best tool I have found to quickly test your keywords is Google Adwords. One of the main reasons I like to use this resource is that you can test your keywords right away instead of waiting up to 5 days anywhere on the other pay per click engines like Overture.

One of the other ways we look to see if the keywords we’ve chosen are really worth it is to look at what our competitors are doing. However, use this technique simply as a guide because they could be making the same mistakes you are. We know of some people who copied what we were doing with the keywords above and wouldn’t have gotten traffic from those keywords the way we did.

The key to success in any business, whether online or in the traditional world, is to test and measure. The way we test to make sure keywords are being used is to check our logs and see who is referring traffic to our site. In the ASP code there are a series of session values ​​that will contain this information. We check our sites every day to make sure the traffic is coming from our target keywords.

If they’re not coming from the keywords we’re targeting and customers buy our products, we’ll look at the keywords being used and find out how competitive they are and if we should be optimizing our site for those keywords. Search engine optimization and internet marketing really is a science, and like all science, you need facts and figures to make decisions, so the more quality statistics you can collect, the easier it will be to make a change of direction.

For example, we recently had a situation where we started getting a couple hundred hits a day for a 5-word statement that was being used by both Google and Yahoo to find our site. While a couple hundred hits a day might not sound like much, our conversion rate on that key statement was hovering around 70%, which is huge for any internet business. The weird part was that our website actually placed at number 97 in the search engine results for both Google and Yahoo.

What we did at this point was simply write a series of articles on the keyword topics. Submit articles to related sites, including article directories, and then make sure that in the Author Bio section we include a hypertext that includes the keyword statement on the associated page. The result was that we increased our ranking from 97 to the top 5 and had a 70% conversion rate on all the people who visited that web page.

However, the key issue is to make sure that the keywords you are using are the ones your buyers associate with. Sometimes I find that a customer’s perception of what keywords a person would use to search for a product is much more different than what their customers actually use. Every time we look at that issue, we just go back to the customer records for the last 6 months and look at the data and find out how their customers find it.

The secret to search engine optimization for any website is in the logs, as they will tell you very clearly what people are using to get to your site, and more importantly, what search engines they are using.

When you’re looking to buy a new domain or create a new site, be sure to do your homework to identify the right keywords that people will use to find your products or services. Before you commit to buying a new domain containing your keywords, always test to see that the keywords are actually being used and that there is enough volume to justify the purchase.

Remember, the reason we test and measure is to make sure you’re making a sound investment. If you make a mistake, you will have to spend more money to correct your mistake and no one likes having to spend their hard-earned money.