Getting Your Keywords Right

With websites, It's all about getting the wording right. Forget the fancy Flash animations, the £2000 fee you were charged by the website company or the specially composed theme music that plays when you arrive on your homepage. It's all wasted time and money, unless those gimmicks are very closely tied to the product you're selling or your area of expertise.

If your key phrases aren't right, forget any chance of web success. I say this with one important qualification. If a website is sheer brilliance - something that everybody loves, like eBay for instance - it wouldn't matter too much if you had all these things, because people would probably use your service anyway. However, if you look at eBay you'll notice that they don't have fancy Flash animations or specially composed theme music on the front page. So take the hint - keep it simple and concentrate on the wording that you use.

The magic of words When somebody types a search term into Google or any other search engine, the search engines sift through thousands and thousands of websites for relevance and then order those sites on your results page.

The reason Google is so popular is because it sorts all those pages so well, cutting out the rubbish and presenting you with the best. How often do you click beyond the first page of results? Seldom? Never? That's why the Holy Grail of websites is to get your site showing on that first page of results. Commercial companies will make you all sorts of promises about how they'll get you on the first page of Google. Oh, and they'll happily relieve you of lots of money for the privilege! But it all boils down to keywords ... and selecting the right ones.

Assembling your keywords The trick to creating a successful online business is:

- First - to determine a niche that is profitable, but not too broad and not too limited.

- Second - to research words and phrases which: a) a decent number of people are searching for b) for which there are relatively few strong results (low supply) and therefore you stand some chance of success c) which are therefore profitable.

- Third - to intelligently sort these options into sub-sections which become the navigation on your website, and then to create lots of informative articles which use those keywords, one by one.

- Four - having created lots of targeted articles, your pages will - step-by-step (it takes time!) - move higher up the search engine results. The less supply there is for a keyword, the easier it will be to 'win' it in Google and rank highly in the search engines.

Search engines love content, so provide lots of it but make sure it's attractive and useful to your website visitors as well as Google and the like.

Keyword crazy You can get a number blindness doing all this keyword work, and to be honest with you, it's the part of the website building process that I hate the most. However, you must get this bit right. If you don't nobody will visit your wonderful website and you'll have wasted your time. So grin and bear it, keep going through the pain barrier, until you have that honed collection of keywords. You are going to create your website content around those keywords, so that when surfers enter those search terms your pages will come up in the results. And, because your content is relevant, informative and search engine friendly, that will be the beginning of your web success.