Doing SEO effectively starts with finding the right words, phrases, and ideas to target.

• Free: Digital Point keyword suggestion tool – free web based tool which compares Wordtracker and Overture search frequencies. (www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/)

• Various Prices (approximately $7 / day to $250 / year): WordTracker – web based leased product which has many more features than the other tools. WordTracker traffic is generally more representative of actual traffic than Overture’s tool since many fewer automated bots scour its data collection network than Overture’s. (www.wordtracker.com)

• Various prices: Keyword Discovery - deep database of keyword data. Contains historical data. Some of their partners made them sign a non disclosure agreement. The database may not be as clean as the WordTracker database, but it does contain more data. (www.keyworddiscovery.com/)

• Free: Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool – offers search frequency for the prior month throughout the Overture network. Please note that many bid checkers and other automated bots cause this number to skew high. (inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)

• Free: Google Keyword Sandbox – shows related search terms but not search quantity. (adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox)
• Free: Google Search Suggestion Tool – auto-completes search queries to help you find more related search terms (www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en)

• Free: Google Sets – shows groups of related keywords. (labs.google.com/sets)

• Free: Good Keywords – free downloadable software which can be used for preliminary keyword research. (www.goodkeywords.com)

• Free: Ontology tool – finds related keywords using the Google ~ search. (www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/)

• Free: Competitors websites and related search suggestions from various search engines such as Vivisimo and Teoma.

Lets give our Traffic Snowball a little push!

So now you have completed the design of your website and you have uploaded the content to your server. The next step is to bring traffic to the website by announcing to the world that your site is live through search engine submission. This should be considered the first little push that we are giving your traffic snowball.

With a rapid increase in the number of web sites competing for exposure, the role of online search engines and directories is becoming critical to any websites success. Eighty seven percent (87%) of web site visitors find their chosen site through search engines.

What’s more, almost all of them use just seven - namely AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, LookSmart, Google, Hotbot and above all, Yahoo

This means that if you don’t have a top listing on these engines, thousands of potential clients will never find you.

There are 3 steps involved in search engine submission
1) Optimization of your web site
2) Submission of your site to the search engines and directories
3) Monitoring of your listings

Lets deal first with Optimization

The website needs to be made “search engine-friendly” before it is submitted to the major search engines This is an art in itself and there are specialist companies, such as Traffic Builder Systems, that deal only in Search engine optimization and rank management.

The first step that is undertaken is to determine the keywords that are relevant to your website.

Some people achieve a top 10 placement in a major search engine and get plenty of traffic. Others do the same but get nothing.

Why?

Simple. The first group selected keywords that many people are searching on, and the second did not!

To find the optimum keywords that are going to bring you the most targeted traffic you could use a tool such as Wordtracker

Wordtracker will compile a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and they tell you how often people search for them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords. Wordtracker helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered. You’ll find out how popular these keywords really are. Then for each major search engine, they will show you the chances of making the top 10.

Once you have got the correct keywords together you will need to format them into META TAGS to place into the HTML of your webpages

If you are going to submit your site to the search engines individually it must be sensitized with META tags.

There are three META tags used by the popular search engines. META tags are added to your website’s HTML coding, and do not appear on your visible webpage. These tags are placed within the head portion of your HTML document, usually directly beneath your tag.

1) The “Keyword” META Tag

The “keyword” META tag helps meta capable search engines in indexing your website. It tells the search engine under which search terms your website should come up under.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”keywords” content=”widgets, cheap widgets, widgets for sale, john store etc..”>

Within this META tag, use your prioritized list of keywords and commanding combinations. Don’t duplicate your keywords too many times. Each keyword should be separated by a comma, and there should be no spaces. Different search engines allow different numbers of keywords. Make sure all keywords listed in your META tag are related to your site.

If you put unrelated keywords in your keyword META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you. Be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags. Some companies have sued because they found their names in the META tags of their competitors.

2) The “Description” META Tag

The “description” META tag helps meta capable search engines to summarize your website.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”John’s widget shop has the largest and cheapest selection of widgets”>

Within this tag, use a description of your website and keep the tag length under 200 characters. Some search engines allow longer or shorter descriptions. Put the most important part of your description first, for cases where search engines do not use all of it.

Some search engines extract your website’s summary from the first 250 characters of your webpage, so be sure you include a good opening paragraph on your webpage. Make sure everything in your description is related to your site. If you put unrelated words or phrases or sentences in your description META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you.

As discussed above, be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags.

3) The “Robots” META Tag

The “robots” META tag tells meta capable search engines which pages should get indexed, and which pages should not. You may have certain pages which you may not want to show up in the search engines. You may have test pages, private pages created for a particular customer, and so on.

If you have a frames site, you wouldn’t want to index your HTML documents which display within the various frames which make up your page.

The following options are available for this tag: all, none, index, noindex, follow, nofollow.

If you wanted all of your pages indexed, you would use this tag on your main page:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”all follow”>

It would tell the search engine spider to index your main page, then follow any links it finds on that page, and spider those links.

Use this tag on a page which you don’t want indexed:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex”>

After entering the META tags into the HTML of your website pages and then uploading to the server, you will then need to proceed to the search engines to submit your website.

Doorway pages

Most people optimize each of their webpages for all of their keywords, and to be submitted to all the major search engines. For less popular keywords this strategy will often suffice. However for competitive keywords it won’t get favorable listings, mainly because when you overly fine tune a webpage to score well for one search engine, it will likely score lower for other search engine. For competitive keywords you should consider using a “multiple entry page” strategy.

This involves using multiple entry pages (also called doorway pages, bridge pages, jump pages and gateway pages), each optimized for a particular keyword and/or search engine. Entry pages act as “front doors” to your website. These special pages are designed to score high in keyword density and relevance.

Each entry pages can be fine tuned for one or a few keywords, and can be fine tuned for a particular search engine. It is not advisable to use the above page naming convention with all search engines, as certain search engines may detect that you are using multiple doorways.

To be safe use names which do not resemble one another: The second step is the submission to the search engines

You have the following options:

1) Submit your site manually to the search engines by visiting each one individually. This can be very time consuming and also there is the problem that every search engine is different in the sense that they each use different logarithms for analyze and ranking the website submission.

2) The submission service will submit your website to many hundreds of search engines and directories on a regular basis. This is usually an automated process, with the drawback being you get no advice on optimization. You may or may not receive reports charting your success.

3) The meta-tag optimisers will take your site and optimize it for a one off fee. They may also offer a service to submit the site once it has been optimized. With this service you have little idea of how successful the service has been long after your money has gone.

4) A small number of companies are taking a Search Engine Rank Management approach. This involves the specialist company taking complete, ongoing control of your search engine marketing needs by optimizing, submitting and monitoring your ranking activity on an ongoing basis.

High search engine ranking is the key to unlocking the true potential of your company’s web site.
Based on our industry leading knowledge of search engine technology, Traffic Builder Systems brings you Traffic Builder, an affordable rank management solution for all web site owners.

Finally, the choice is yours but remember that search engine promotion is fundamental to your success and should be the start of the the initial push to get noticed. Investment in good search engine promotion will pay dividends later.

How do I know which keywords to target?

The most important task you will have is determining which keywords you should target on any given page of your website.

I say “any given page of your website” because you should optimize each page individually. Each page on your site needs to be able to stand on its own as far as ranking for keywords on that particular page.

This enables you to bring in visitors on many different keywords and keyword phrases instead of just the few that your home page will be optimized for.

I don’t recommend simply copying and pasting each page and then modifying the content. You should take the time and start each page from scratch.

This enables you to better optimize each page for the keywords you are hoping to target. You want to try and take full advantage of the potential traffic you can get by having many ‘doorways’ into your site.

The more doors you have, the more traffic you can get. View each page as a new ‘doorway’ into your site through which Web surfers can enter.

Although your first instinct will be to go with more popular terms such as music, marketing, or cars, you should narrow the scope quite a bit.

Some reasons for not optimizing your pages for these types of keywords are:

1) They are too broad - If your website is about Rap music, would you want to attract thousands of Country music or Gospel music fans? Even if you are tempted to answer ‘yes’ to that question, you should say ‘no’. These visitors won’t be interested in your music, and will quickly leave in search of a site that fits their interests.

2) Too much competition - You will have a much more difficult time getting a high ranking on the search engines when you use these more general and more popular terms because you will have literally millions of websites all trying to get the same spot you are.

3) Too much time and effort involved - If you decide to try and compete with the other millions of webmasters out there trying to get into the top 25 or so listings, you’ll spend an awful lot of time trying to get there, and spend even more trying to keep your position!

I’m sure your next thought will be: “Okay, I’ll go for Internet Marketing, or Rap Music, or Used Cars!”

Well, that does narrow things down a bit, but these phrases will still have a ton of competition.

The better (and more profitable) approach is to search for keywords and keyword phrases that meet both of the following:

1) Popular - They are searched for by a lot of people

2) Have little competition - It is so much easier to get a high ranking (and stay there!) when you target keywords that have little competition.

The key to success with the search engines is to find keywords that many of your potential customers are searching for, but that few of your competitors are optimizing for.

How in the World do I do that?

The absolute best resource you’re going to find online for finding keywords that fit the above criteria is: WordTracker

They offer a free trial, and if you need to have access to the more advanced reporting features, or would like to research other search engines not offered in the trial, you can subscribe to their service for a small fee.

The trial will work just fine, but if you decide to get serious, this will be the best money you spend. Each time you add a new page to your website you should research the best keyword phrases and optimize that page for them.

Since this is such a valuable resource, and because this part of your search engine strategy is so important , I’m going to give you a quick tutorial (complete with screen shots!) of how to use WordTracker to find the best keywords.

Obviously you’ll need to have a general idea of what the subject of your website is, or is going to be, and then click here to go to the WordTracker website.

Once there, find and click on the Trial link. You will then be asked to enter your name and email address to start your trial. (They will send the results to this email address, so make sure you enter a valid address.)

Make sure you check the box to get the weekly Top 500 Keywords report! This is a very useful email that you’ll get once a week that will show you the most popular keywords for that week.

Then you’ll see the following:

For this example I’ll enter in “marketing” and click Proceed, which will then bring up a list of related keywords and phrases:

You will have a left window and a right window, and when you click a keyword it will display the results in the right window.

By clicking on marketing, I get this result in the right window:

This list gives various keyword phrases with the word “marketing” in them, and sorts them by number of searches.

What you will then do is click on a few of these keywords to add them to your basket (don’t worry, this will make more sense after you’ve gone through it once.)

After you’ve added a few of these keywords to your basket, click the link to move to Step 3.

This step gives you some choices that are only available in the full version, so just click the link to go to Step 4.

Step 4 is where you’ll find the good stuff!

The important information on this page is the KEI Analysis. This gives each keyword a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.

A low score means that either not many people search for the keyword, or that there is too much competition for it.

The amount of competition is determined by searching for each keyword on the selected search engine, and finding out how many sites come up in the results.

What you want is a good mixture of popularity and competition … or lots of popularity and little competition!

If you look at the scale just above the table in this graphic you will see what KEI numbers will mean you have found a good keyword or keyword phrase.

In this example it appears that I didn’t find any good keyword choices.

But, another search I ran found these:

As you can see in that list, there are a few terms that have a very high KEI ranking. This means that these would be good keywords to target because they have a good ratio of popularity to competition.

This is exactly what you are looking for when trying to find the best keywords to target for your website or for individual pages on your website.

When you choose keywords that are popular and that have little competition, you’ll be able to quickly get your site into the top results for that keyword.

The following articles will show you what you must do to make sure you take the right steps to take advantage of the great keywords you discovered during the above process.

Edit : These is a new upgrade from Wordtracker that gives more accurate results. If you find that you liked Wordtracker, you should try KeywordSpy.

KeywordSpy - keyword research technology