Effective keyword use will often determine your website’s success or failure in ranking well with various search engines.
What is your business about, what are you promoting and selling?
Relevant keywords and phrases about your business and how to use them is fundamental to getting your website recognised and ranking well. Choosing the right words, phrases and using them in quality, well written content is your best marketing tool to promote your small business.
So what should you do, well here is my list:
- Make a list of words and phrases that define your business and get to the core of what your business is about.
- Narrow the list to the most important three to five keywords and phrases.
- Have a look at your competition, see note below.
- Use your location with the keywords and phrases when writing your content.
When you have your list of keywords and phrases, the next step is to write your content. DO NOT overuse the keywords as stuffing your content with them may actually harm your website as the search engines may regard you as a spam website. Write your content around your business and products that you are promoting, check your content for spelling and grammatical errors and that it makes sense. There is no substitute for well written content, content is king in the on-line world.
When you have your list and are happy with it, your web designer will incorporate them into the structure of your new site to maximise your chances of ranking well.
Note.
Don’t forget to check what your competition are using. If you right click on your competitor’s website and select “view source” you will see the page code. Near the top of the page you will see a line of code something like this –
<meta name=”keywords” content=”look here, this is where you will find a list of keywords” />
Note that not all web sites will have this line of code. Flash sites may not have it but they are unlikely to rank well and sometimes, the web designer will leave them out as they really are not important to the search engines which have ignored them for some years now. What they are important for is that they give you an insight to what your competition think are important keywords to describe their business.
