Get more traffic by distributing and target your keywords the right way!

By Per Strandberg
Posted Monday, November 29, 2004

Discusses the importance on of how to distribute optimized keywords on web pages and how this should be done over a whole web site. In order to optimize a web site’s pages to increase traffic, you have first to plan and do some research. To often people just put in some keywords in the Meta tags that they think is important. Then they put the same phrases in the main text. This method generates no or little traffic to a site. This is just like walking around blindfolded.

Often the keywords are single words and to general, which means that the competition for them are too great.

A proper planning is therefore necessary.

First one has to investigate which type of search phrases people use when looking for similar sites.

You start this process by brainstorming and guessing which type of key phrases people are using. Look up for synonyms.

Depending on if this is for a small or large site you should spend anything from a few hours up to a day to do this. One way to find keywords is to look at your competitor sites. Do this by looking at the HTML code of their pages. To be able to view the HTML code you just click on View on the web browser menu and click on source.

From this list of brainstormed keywords you should research which keyword phrases people actually are using. You can find different resources for this on the web. Some cost money, but some are free. The resource that most professional web search engine optimizing people use is WordTracker. This cost some money. But others are free. Many Pay Per Click search engines have a free statistical database over how often keywords are used in searches. These are great resources for determining how popular different search terms are. Then you have to determine how much competition there are for these phrases. You don’t want to have a web page optimized for words for which the completion is the big.

Instead target phrases for which the competition is less. There also many combination of phrases for which there is no real competition. By combining a primary keyword for which the competition is hard, but not to hard, with keyword phrases for which the competition is smaller you often get the best results. These additional keyword phrase combinations should for the best result contain the primary keyword inside their phrases. For example if the single keyword is “rafting” then the combination phrases could be “river rafting”, “canadian rafting” “rafting equipment” or something similar.

There are other factors to include determining which keyword phrases you should use to gain maximum traffic.

Where you will end up in the search list will also depend on your site’s popularity and the number of pages the site contains. Popularity can be gain be having other quality sites linking in to your site. This factor is called link popularity. A page can also gain link popularity if there are several internal pages linking in to that particular page. The internal structure and size of a site are factors that will determine where on the search list you will end up.

This research and fine-tuning of keywords phrases to gain optimal traffic from search engines have been very time consuming. Most companies that want better exposure on the Internet hire external help for this.

Until now there have been no good tools to do this on an individual base. The trick has been to make a good layout for a site and then distribute keywords for which the pages should be optimized for. You have to make a good mix of keywords over the site in such a way as to make them fit in naturally.

Per Strandberg (www.catch-traffic.com) Web Optimization Made Easy!

About the Author
Per Strandberg have been working with software and web development since the beginning of the web. Currently he is involved in web marketing and has created a tool for keyword distribution to help web master better optimize web sites. He has also published an e-book on search engine optimization. Currently he is working with affiliate marketing using his methods.