Using Keywords Effectively
As a budding online business, you’ve carefully chosen keywords to put in your metatags on your webpages. After that you sat back to watch the sales just come rolling in. Don’t be discouraged if that doesn’t happen right away. Instead, do yourself a favor and analyze why. Here’s how to get started.
Creating a set of keywords you want people to use in search engines to find your business is only the first step. To find true success, you need to track the effectiveness of those keywords. Keep in mind that your website keywords won’t be ranked high overnight. It takes time to cultivate a high ranking on any search engine, but let’s focus on keywords for now.
First, you must either invest in a good website logfile analysis tool (such as Webtrends) or an online service such as Google Analytics. These tools will show you what keywords people are using at search engines that end up visiting your website. They also show you how often people have found your site using those keywords and when they visited. If you’ve chosen keywords people aren’t using, you need to ask yourself why not. There could be several reasons:
- You are not effectively using the word or phrase regularly in your content.
- You chose a word or phrase that is too generic.
- Competition is doing a better job than you are in owning the keyword.
- The keyword isn’t truly relevant to your organization.
Second, start tweaking your content and your keywords after watching keyword performance for a couple months. Here are some hints on making adjustments:
- Watch your exits. If visitors to your site, using a specific keyword, don’t go any deeper into your site than the initial page the search engine brought them to, then your keyword may not be relevant to what the person was looking for, or your content didn’t meet their needs. You may need to review the keyword or change your content to drive the visitor deeper or to make a sale.
- Pay attention to unknown keywords. If you see keywords you hadn’t thought of showing up in your website statistics, consider whether each is a useful keyword. Could you drive more traffic by focusing on a new keyword? You may want to start focusing on a new keyword or deemphasize it if it isn’t a useful word.
- Tweak keywords that don’t generate traffic. If a keyword isn’t generating any traffic at all, try making it less generic as well as increasing its visibility in your page content.
Finally, continue monitoring and tracking keyword performance throughout the life of your Web site. The online landscape is constantly changing. New competitors show up daily and search engine algorithms change constantly. In order to have an effective online presence, driving traffic from search engines is critical. You have to watch keyword performance because keywords are the primary indicator of how most visitors find your organization online.
