What IS
important, is using those keywords in the headline and body text of each of your web pages (not just the home page). First thing to do is to decide exactly
what keywords or keyword phrases your customers actually use when they are trying to find the product or service you are advertising on your web site. One example
would be a company selling beer on-line. You may liberally sprinkle your home page with all the key names of your products, like Budweiser, Coors, Fosters and so
on, but the most used word by people searching to buy alcohol on-line is simply 'beer'! So, do not fall into the trap of using keywords that make
sense to you, find out what your customers are likely to type into a search engine and use those words instead. Its is not a matter of what you want the site to
say. You are not doing this to please yourself or your marketing department, you are doing it to sell.
Also, avoid using what is referred to as marketing speak on your web pages,
it won't help get your pages ranked at all. "We carry the widest selection
of high quality sportswear and sporting goods available in the UK" should
be ditched in favour of, "We stock, trainers, tennis shoes, running shoes
and football boots by Nike, Puma (etc) along with soccer strips,
tracksuits, shorts, T-shirts ... (well you know the rest). Talk to your
customers, your family, friends, the kids and find out what they would
type into the search bar of Google to find what you sell, then use those
keywords or key phrases as often as possible in your text.
Take a look at
www.easternbox.co.uk, the website of one of our
clients, and see how many times the words 'corrugated', 'packaging', 'boxes', 'cases' and the phrase 'point of sale' are repeated. The wording may seem a little
repetitive, but in five months from launching the site, they have seen it climb onto the first two pages of Google, Yahoo, Lycos and Ask Jeeves when they keyword
phrases "Corrugated boxes", "Corrugated cases", "Corrugated packaging" and "Corrugated Point of Sale packaging" are entered.
They generally rank between 1st and 50th for these phrases, from a list in the UK alone of more than
170,000 sites. These phrases are the most used
keyword searches input by people in the UK looking for cardboard boxes. They have not paid for a single listing to get this site ranked as highly as it
currently is. Keywords can be used singly, or better still in groups of two words.
The trend today is get
company names, concise advertising logo's, even addresses and such produced as images and put onto web pages. They will not help you get a web site
ranked highly. Again, where possible, substitute all this with typed text. True it may not look so sexy, but in reality, what use is a really cool web site that
no one can find in a search engine?
This use of images of
'Flash' which are moving images or logo's all look cool but are no use
whatever in getting your website onto the first 2 pages of any search
engine. This is because search engines only use text to rank sites and
there is not useable text in images or moving logo's.
For more information, see our
page on using Macromedia Flash on
websites. |