the Art of Zen

Keyword Searching
One of the most important things to know about optimizing your site for the search engines is how your market searches for you. Now unless your company name is the same as the product or service you sell, people most likely won’t search for your company by name; unless there is some point of contact prior to them searching for your site (i.e. business card, mailer, radio or TV ad, etc.).

Let’s say you sell widgets. If you company’s name is Widgets Inc. then you have a pretty good shot of being found under the search results for ‘Widgets’. But if your company name is TechToys Inc. and your toys are widgets, then it’ll be a lot tougher to get found by your company name alone when somebody is searching for ‘Widgets’.

So how do you get around this little issue? You do some research of course.

The first thing you want to do is talk to everyone; ask people what they would use to search for your product or service. And don’t give them any help. Be as vague as you can about what you sell or just hand them what you sell and see how their mind works. Remember, while you are used to your industries terms, others may not be. You may be surprised to find out what people use to search for your offer. Another way to get some ideas is to do a search for your leading competitors and see what they’re using in their meta tags.

Once you have an idea of what keywords people use to search for your product or service, then you need to see “how popular” that word or phrase is online. There are several tools out there that can help you find the right search terms for you; but a few that work really well are the Keyword Tool for Google AdWords: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and the Yahoo! Overture keyword tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ .

Start putting in your new found search words or phrases and look at the numbers. These tools will tell you not only the popularity of a search term and how many people search using the terms but they also offer ideas of related terms that people have used over the past month.

You may be thinking that you’re done now. You have the keywords that people use most often to find your Widget, now all you have to do is add those terms to you web page and Walla!.. You are at the top of page #1 in all search engines. Unfortunately, that mostly likely won’t be the case. You see, Widgets are not an original idea anymore and you have some competition out there. So the next step is to see how much competition you actually have on your new found search terms.

Part 2 covers finding the best terms for the greatest results (It’s not always the most popular).