find your target keywords

If you are already familiar with the techniques to find target keywords for your site, please skip onto the next page: targeting your keywords >>

So you have built your website, you know your business, next you must put yourself in the shoes of your customers. What would you type into a search engine box if you were looking for what your site had to offer. Be careful here, you may be too close to what you do to know what terms or names other people call your products or services. Get a couple of friends who are not involved in the field to list what they would type in, get them to search for it and watch over their shoulders at what sites they go for and if they revise their search after seeing the first set of results. Doing this will give you a good feel of what people are going to be doing when looking, potentially, for your site.

Suppose for instance that you are trying to promote a camping and caravan site on the Isle of Wight called "Adam's Camp and Caravan Site". There is no point in spending lots of time optimizing too heavily for "Adam's Camp and Caravan site" since there would be only one of them in the area and the person that knows the name will be able to find it easily. When there is only one site relevent to something such as a business name you normally don't have to compete with anyone else. Instead, assume that the person does not know the name of the shop or business and searches for "Isle of Wight camping", this is a search term worth optimising. Furthermore, people may search for "camping Isle of Wight", "Isle of Wight campsites", "campsite on the isle of wight" etc. In contrast, there is absolutely no point targeting the search for just "camping"; for one you don't stand a chance of getting anywhere near the top 100 pages of a search engine with this and secondly, if you did get to #1 you would get an enormous amount of useless traffic- the chances of the search being for the Isle of Wight are pretty slim in a worldwide search and the traffic to the site would overload your server and render your site unobtainable for people that are searching for a camp site on the Isle of Wight.

The wordtracker keyword research tool is a very good aid to this process. This tool enables you to enter a search term and see how many people are searching for that phrase every month. It also suggests other search phrases that you may wish to try, many of them you may not have thought of. We have been using this tool for years and highly recommend it for this purpose. A free trial is available and it is very simple to use. Try it now by clicking here and compile you target keywords before going on to the next stage.

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