How to add more keywords to your keyword list continued

Country specific terms

I used a short while ago the term backyard as an example of such a country specific term. In South Africa the word veld even though it is not an English word is often used by English speaking people. Use local terms a lot if this is your market.

Localised 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 web site 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 hometown. 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 probably 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.

Finding Keywords using Inktomi and FAST ... the search engines are now owned by Yahoo

I submitted certain of my web pages to the paid for inclusion services of Inktomi and FAST. Each page submitted is charged for. In return the search engine will list the pages in its index this is the only way a listing can be achieved initially/quickly. However there is no guarantee at to where it will show up in the index. This means you can waste a lot of money by using such engines unless you also optimise the pages for the search engines concerned.

A big advantage of using paid for inclusion services is the fact that the pages submitted are refreshed very regularly (ie changes are monitored as much as every two days using Inktomi). This mechanism allows you to make a change and see the impact upon ranking very quickly. With engines like Google this can take a long time to work through to a ranking change.

Armed with this new information a decision can be made as to whether to optimise a brand new page for this keyword.

Using your logs to discover keywords

Many hosts provide good stats programs free of charge. Some of these programs with which I am familiar including Webtrends and Awstats produce web statistics that include a list of keywords used to find your web site. This is highly valuable information. Use it constantly to trim the sails of your efforts to rank highly with search engines.

By using Overture, brainstorming, casual note taking, reviewing competitor sites, misspellings and so on a very long list of keywords can be obtained the longer the better.

The trouble with this approach and another reason why serious readers must subscribe to Wordtracker is how do you tell which are the keywords to optimise web pages for and in which priority order. It is quite conceivable that what you think is a very good keyword is not often used in practice (remember aquatic information example used earlier) and you can waste a tremendous amount of time and effort by selecting the wrong keywords.

Special software allows you to import your own list of keywords into its own program in bulk and then check if they are popular or not. At the same time it lists the competition and calculates a special relative strength called KEI.

This chapter has hopefully opened your mind to the opportunities to find and attract web visitors. It is not possible for me to overstress the importance of your keyword list and the need to continually expand it.

If you operate in a specialized field where there are not too many switched on competitors using good keywords that are well optimised will almost guarantee you lots of traffic without doing much more than writing a good web page with the keywords included in it.

Controlling your keywords and project

This is probably a good time to introduce you to controlling your keywords and web pages. As you get further along the track to writing and publishing web pages for many different keywords, web pages and even web sites you may become confused (as I did). It is vital that you can track which keyword, which web page, which web site, which host, which domain name etc etc etc relating to the work that you have done.

You can do yourself a big favour by constructing a table early on use a spreadsheet for this. Based upon my experience the example below is what I suggest your table should look something like. As you progress add the name of the host, your password and username to access the web host upload facility, web log details to access site stats, date indexed, initial SERP position and any other information that might be useful to yourself. All these above I found indispensable. You will find you use this table all the time it will occupy pride of place on your desk or you will be forever frustrated trying to find it.

Note that the file names above begin with lower case letters. Note they do not use spaces. They do not use underscores or hyphens.

I suggest you follow a convention from the start. You will find as your sites grow you will not be able to remember whether you used spaces or not which files started with capitals and so on. Whether you take up this suggestion or not do decide upon a system that you will stick with to avoid future confusion. My failure to do this cost me a lot of effort and time later removing spaces in file names, removing capital letters and so on. For example I had used two different file names koi_food.htm and koifood.htm. Unfortunately when I made site modifications later I forgot to change links to koi_food and had a number of broken links in action for quite some time.

This is one of those little tips worth a lot sooner or later.

If you aspire to becoming a good SEO you do need to be well organized and spreadsheets help you to do this very easily.

Using a Mind Map

Much of this book was planned using Mind Maps. As a web page was created and published to the web for each keyword it was crossed off. Exactly the same information could be recorded and controlled in countless other ways. Using Mind Maps allows the work to be pictured, coloured, neatly laid out and organized. It almost forces you to pay attention to the work still to be done you cannot easily ignore the tasks uncompleted as you can when ideas are expressed in tabular format.