Select specific keyword phrases for your website

The most important part of search engine optimization is selecting the right keyword phrases or “keyphrases”.

It is true that many searchers enter one-word queries into the search form. The chance of competing successfully for one-word search queries is fairly remote, however, unless you are trying to promote a very specific and rare scholarly term.

You will need a million-dollar budget to win the fight over general terms such as “car” or “holiday,” and what is the point, anyway?

Let us suppose you are promoting a hotel in St. Anton, Austria. What are the chances that someone searching for “holiday” is looking for a hotel room in St. Anton? They are more likely looking for general information on holidays and traveling.

If you search for the generic keyword “holiday” in Google you get millions of hits. A search for “alpine ski resorts” gives 603 listings. If you optimize your pages for “alpine ski resorts” the chances for getting a good listing increases dramatically. Moreover, you are more likely to get visitors that are genuinely interested in your hotel.

It is not the number of visitors (“the click-through rate”) that matter most, but the number of buying or returning visitors (“the conversion rate”).

Setting up a list of keyword phrases
Set up a list of relevant keyword phrases. Ask friends and colleagues what query they would enter when looking for a service or product like yours. Do not trust your own instincts in this!

Then try to find relevant synonyms by using a thesaurus, and take variations of English into consideration (“baggage” or “luggage,” “optimization” or “optimisation”).

Finally, go to one of the online keyword services and see how popular the various search phrases are. The keyword services will also help you finding other relevant phrases.

We highly recommend the online Wordtracker service for this kind of work.

Again: It is not necessarily smart to go for the most popular phrase. You can often win more visitors by selecting a less competitive expression. However, the phrase should not be too rare and narrow.

Now, why you should settle for only one keyword phrase? You should not! However, you must find one keyword phrase that is to be the crucial one. Optimize your home page for that keyword phrase, as many search engines give more weight to the home page in the top directory (e.g. yoursite.com/index.html) than other pages.

You may try to optimize the same page for more than one keyword phrase, but under no circumstance should you go for more than three. If you do so, you will dilute the effect of the individual keyword phrases.

Please note that some search engines ignore so-called “stop words,” which are words that are so common that they are left out of the search engine database.

Among these are a, an, and, for, is, on, or, the, and to, as well as commonly used words as “Web”, “html” and “title.” You can determine if a word is a stop word by searching for it. If you get “no results” it’s probably a stop word.

However, that does not necessarily mean that all search engines will fail finding a keyword phrase containing such words. Do some testing! If a certain stop word is absolutely essential, try placing the phrase within quotation marks: “keyword phrase”.

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