Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Keywords and Keyphrases

Without keywords or keyphrases, search engine visitors simply would be unable to find your web-site. When the search engines visit your site, they index the words that they find and record the order and the priority you have given them. The more words you use, and the diversity in the order in which these words are written, will give you an added advantage.

Keyword adjacency
Consider the next three keyphrases:

-Increase Traffic to your Website
-How to increase website traffic
-Need more traffic? Increase visitors to your website

When indexed by the search engine spiders, these keyphrases represent opportunities for the site to appear in the results for searches. For instance, the eventuality of finding this site is increased if the following phrases were searched for:

-Increase traffic from "Increase traffic to your website"

-Increase website traffic from "How to increase website traffic"

-Website traffic from "How to increase website traffic"

-Traffic increase from "Need more traffic? Increase visitors to your website"

-Increase visitors from "Need more traffic? Increase visitors to your website"

-More traffic from "Need more traffic? Increase visitors to your website"

Concentrate on your keyphrases, not on individual keywords. The competition amongst website managers is far too intense for your single popular keywords to be found high in search engine rankings (unless you're very lucky!). Moreover, as searchers are becoming more sophisticated in their method of querying the search engines, they are increasingly using multiple word searches.

Do you really want to spend time and effort on single generic keywords?
Your visitors are far more likely to be better targeted with multiple keywords than random searches with words like "travel" or "pets".
Of course if you work in a niche market with little or no competition, you should optimise both keyphrases and keywords.


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