There are different types of keywords I would like to cover. I will cover these in the order of importance. Keywords are the main meat of your website. You can have all the pictures in the world but without keywords your site will not show up in the search engines. A common mistake I have found with many of my clients if they want to focus on the design and pictures in a website and not on textual content. The truth is pictures will help to sell your product but only after someone finds your site. Since search engines run off text searches, you must use text to be found by the search engines.
Major Keywords
I wanted to point out that the title says “Major Keywords” and not “Major Keyword”. The reasons for this is you don’t want to make one of the most common mistakes, using only one keyword. The reason to use multiple keywords is so that your site is not based off just one keyword. If you build your keyword strategy off just one keyword you will actually be limiting your potential visitors and buyers. Most websites offer several services and you want to push all of your services. I would suggest around 5-7 major keywords. If your site is large and offers many different services you may want to push a few more but I would recomened not to exceed 10. Your major keywords should be single words or very short phrases. On average when someone performs a search they do not search for more than 2 words.
Keyword Phrases
Your keyword phrases should be based off your major keywords. This means if one of your major keywords was “lava lamps” you may want to use a phrase such as “red lava lamps” or “lava lamp store”. These should be some of the most common phrases that you believe people would search for. I would suggest coming up with an initial list of aobut 20 of these but the possibilities are limitless.
Qualifiers
Qualifiers are additional words that apply to your keywords and keyword phrases. Examples of these words would be “free” or “info”. You want to use these qualifiers all through out your website.
Another kinda of qualifier is your location. Some websites rely on local business. If your trying to appeal to a ceritan location use qualifiers such as city, state, county, common names used for the area (ex. Central Florida), etc.
Brand Names
Don’t forget that brand names are very important. I was working with a client that sold canvas and awnings. They sold canvas made by “Sunbrella” which I learned was one of the most popular types of canvas out there. Upon learning this I worked this brand name into their keyword strategy. This keyword would bring more specific visitors to your website and viewing your products.
Singular & Plural keywords
Not every search engine can see the difference between singular and plural words. Google is one of the search engines that doesn’t notice the difference. If you typed “lava lamp” and then searched for “lava lamps” you will get different results because it sees them as different phrases. You need to remember to work the plural words into your keyword strategy.
Misspellings & Stemming Keywords
I don’t know the exact statistics but from running a large online forum I have learned that most internet users can’t spell worth a darn. For this exact reason we need to remember to work with common misspellings. Google tries to help this issue by offering suggestions when it recognizes a misspelling but it does not always catch all of these. If some of your keywords can be spelled differently you may want to appeal to this. For example “lava lamp” is two words but many will spell it as “lavalamp”.
Another term to know is word stemming. This is the use of a root word as synonyms for many other words. Example would be “boat” and “boating” with the root word being “boat”. Many search engines such as Google will deliver the same results most of the time. This means you do not have to try and cover all of the different word possibilities of a keyword.
Stop Words & Common Words
There are many words that are so common that it would be pointless to index the entire web for these words. Some of these words include “a”, “the”, “and”, etc. You do not have to remove these words from you website but should at least know that these words will not improve your rankings in the search engines.
If your phrase has a common word such as “and” in it, the search engines will just ignore that word. This means if your keyword phrase is “web design” the word “web” will be removed in many search engines. Now I do not suggest your remove these common words because users can still to an exact match or phrase search in search engines where these will show up.
To find out if your word is a stop word go to a search engine and type just that word in without any quotes. If it returns no results then that word is a stop word. Make sure you don’t use stop words as any of your major keywords.
Search Keywords That Work
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