When I was young and brash, my mother used to tell me, "Before you speak to me young man, choose your words carefully." In this course section I am going to discuss the importance of carefully choosing the words that you use on your web pages. I will show you how the words you use make the difference in whether or not your website is found on the search engines and whether you are able to sell your products to the web audience you have attracted. This is probably one of the most important lessons in this course.

The Internet is like a great big version of the Family Feud Game.

When I think about the Internet it reminds me of that television game show "The Family Feud." The way the game show worked is that the producers of the game show would poll the audience on a question like “What are the top 10 things you would find in a kitchen?” The contestants are then supposed to guess what the top 10 most popular words the audience thought of for things found in a kitchen. It didn’t matter if the contestant came up with a brilliant answer, if the contestant’s answer was not on the audience’s list, then the contestant’s team was out of the game and the other team got a chance at the money.

The Internet is just like that game show. Your opinion doesn’t mean anything. Your website is not about you, it’s about your visiting audience. It doesn’t matter what words you think they will use to find your website. The only words that matter are the actual words that the Internet visitor types in the search engine search box when he is looking for a website just like yours. If you haven’t optimized your website to be found for those keyword phrases, then you are out of the game and your competitors are going to get their chance at the money.

I cannot stress how important it is to know the keywords and language of your marketplace. I would say that out of each work day, I spend 25% of the day investigating keywords and phrases. Before I perform each of these following tasks, I spend time investigating to figure out what the right keywords should be.

1. Registering a domain name. I always try to include keywords as part of my domain names.
   
2. The name of a new and often fictitious web site company. I will explain about this later.
   
3. Before I write a headline I think about my keywords. I always try to use keywords and action verbs in every headline.
   
4. Before I write any website copy or product descriptions. My product descriptions always contain popular keywords and phrases.
   
5. Before I name a graphic image, a web page, or a style in a style sheet I name them after a key phrase.
   
6. The text I use to link to other websites especially contains very carefully thought out key phrases.
   
7. Another place you really need to be careful of the keywords you choose is for the title of your web page. Also while I’m thinking about it your web page description and the keyword HTML tag that tells what your web page is about needs well thought out keywords.
   

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel, find out what search phrases people are already using to find your product or service.

Before you can optimize a page to win on the Internet, you first have to decide for which of the most popular search phrases you want this particular page to be found. By the way, just in case you are thinking that the right answer is “all of them”, just think again. This may seem like a totally obvious concept, but in reality more than 98% of all web pages were not created or optimized to win on any particular keyword search phrase. Most people and companies create web pages without regard or even basic research as to whether or not anyone is actually searching for their particular information or product.

Companies and individuals alike generally create web pages about what they know or what they have to sell. I am in perfect agreement that you shouldn’t write about things you know nothing about, and if you have a warehouse full of products that you must sell, you should definitely try to sell them. My point is, before you put a lot of hard work into publishing your information or trying to sell your product on the Internet, you should first find out if anybody is actively looking for your exact information or product. It is easier to sell something to someone if they are actually searching for your information or looking to buy your product, rather than if they just accidentally stumble across it one day.

So who publishes a list of what search words people use on the search engines?

There are several places to find out what people are currently searching for on the Internet and what search phrases they are using to find it. The most frequently used source for this kind of information is Overture’s (http://www.overture.com) "search term suggestion tool" found here.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

The really great thing about this tool is that it not only shows you the number of searches for the search term that you specified, but also shows you how many people are looking for other search phrases that happen to contain your search term. For example when you type in the search term "horse" here are the first few results displayed:

Searches done in May 2003
Count	Search Term
583707	horse
142659	horse for sale
117472	horse racing
78205	horse picture
61806	horse gift
56074	horse art
54611	horse magazine
48131	arabian horse
46222	horse lover
45657	gift for horse lover

Good Keywords: A simpler way to use Overture’s search term suggestion tool.

Good Keywords is a very handy free PC software program that lets you query Overture’s search term suggestion tool along with similar information from Teoma without having to load a web browser and visit their web sites. You will find that the Good Keywords program is much more convenient to use and has better functionality then does Overture’s own tool. Remember, Good Keywords gets its information by querying Overture’s tool for you.

The free Good Keywords program is a great little program but I much prefer the commercial version. Currently available for $77 dollars is what’s called Bid Reporter Professional 3.0 which gives you all of the features of Good Keywords and gives you the full ability to see all pay-per-click search engine bids instantly for each keyword all on one screen. It also graphs the trends for each keyword phrase so that you can easily see the sweet spots where you get the most bang for your buck when it comes to bidding for keyword ranking in the pay-per-click search engines.

Other uses for Good Keywords are to help construct your HTML Meta keyword tags. For those of you that don’t know what a Meta keyword tag is, it’s a little piece of hidden HTML code at the top of web pages that help some of the search engines figure out what your web page is all about. Good Keywords allows you to save your newly discovered great key word phrases into its built-in keyword pad so you can later paste them into your HTML code.

The Good Keywords software can be found for free on this website: http://www.goodkeywords.com

You get what you pay for and Overture’s service is free.

Overture’s free search term suggestion tool is certainly priced right for the new Internet business owner, but as is often true in life, you get what you pay for. Overture’s tool has a bad habit of consolidating results for different words and phrases into one result. For instance, when you search for the phrase "horse" it returns this result:

Searches done in May 2003
Count      Search Term
583707   horse

And when you search for the phrase "horses" it returns the exact same result:

Searches done in May 2003
Count      Search Term
583707   horse

Overture has consolidated the singular and plural results for "horse" and "horses" into one result. We really don’t know which phrase is more popular. This would not be nearly as much of a problem except for the fact that Google and other search engines will return two totally separate sets of results for these two search phrases. This means you have to optimize your page for one or the other of these two search phrases. In this case you really want to know which one is more popular and will give you a bigger bang for your money and time.

Overture uses what they call a "match driver" which also has problems with synonymous phrases. For example if you type in the phrase “Costa Rica map” you will get the same number of search results as when you type in the phrase "map of Costa Rica." In real life though we have discovered that "map of Costa Rica" is typed in as the preferred search phrase 31% more times then "Costa Rica map." This means you could potentially lose 31% more sales if you optimize for the phrase “Costa Rica map” rather than “map of Costa Rica.” In a perfect world you would optimize your web page to be number #1 for both phrases, but we don’t live in a perfect world. So how do we find out which of the two above phrases was more popular? Enter a web software solution called Wordtracker.

http://www.wordtracker.com

Wordtracker compiles a daily updated database of search terms that people are typing into popular search engines when trying to locate specific information on various subjects. This program tells you how often people search for a particular search term and how many competing web sites are trying to be at the top of the list of search results for that term.

Wordtracker can help you find all keyword combinations that may bear any relation to your business or service. You may not have even considered a lot of these phrases while brainstorming keywords for your website. After finding these key search phrases, Wordtracker will help you assess your chances of making the top 10 search results for many of the popular search engines.

Beware the Jabberwork

Let’s rehash this subject one more time. One of the most common mistakes website owners make is trying to become popular for some phrase nobody is searching for. Sometimes, keywords that seem obvious to you are not as common as you would think which is why researching your keywords is so important to the success of your web site. People get hung up on the idea of using a particular phrase, which may be just perfect in describing their product, but which no-one else would think to use. I see this problem all the time when I attend Internet Marketing Conferences. Some search engine guru will show me how popular they are in Google for a phrase that I know that no one is searching for. Then they turn around and complain to me that they have top listings but still nobody comes to their website and buys anything. I always ask them the same question. "How many people searched for that phrase in the last 30 days?" They always give me the same reaction and answer. They give me this sort of a blank stare and say "Well I think a lot. How should I know?"

Wordtracker is the best tool to help you find related search phrases. Not everybody thinks to use the same words you do.

You need to take advantage of other keywords and phrases that mean the same thing or are closely associated with your primary key phrase. You'll end up with a lot more website traffic this way. A good example is the term 'website promotion'. If you were to simply target just this keyword you would miss out on all the traffic by targeting also 'internet marketing', 'web marketing' or 'internet advertising'. They're all different ways saying basically the same thing.

Here is another example of just a few related search terms for the word "golf." Some of the words in the list need another word modifier so that you know what the subject matter is that we are talking about.

1. golf
   
2. pga
   
3. clubs
   
4. instruction
   
5. equipment
   
6. tips
   
7. golfing
   
8. putter
   
9. courses
   
10. putters
    
11. irons
    

Sometimes words are related by mental word association. As soon as I say either the word “putter” or “irons” nine out of ten times the word “golf” pops into someone’s head. You really couldn’t call these words true synonyms for the word “golf” but they would act as distinctly related search terms on the Internet as a replacement for the word "golf." Anyone who happened to be searching for those two search terms would more than likely be that exact demographic audience you were looking for to visit a website about the topic of golf.

The reason I am discussing this is that it is often easier to get a top search engine ranking for a related search phrase then it is for your primary biggest and most popular search phrase. Sometimes three smaller and easier to win on related search phrases will give you more web site traffic than a mediocre ranking on a huge search phrase.

After you have found all of the keyword phrases that have meaning to your business, you can check each word’s popularity in the Wordtracker database to see how many times a particular search term has appeared and been counted in the database over a 60 day period. The “predict” number found in the column next to the count on your Wordtracker results page is the maximum total predicted amount of traffic for all of the major search engines/pay-per-click engines and directories on the day you performed your Wordtracker search.

Keyword	Count	Predict
golf	10265	8108
golf clubs	8213	6488
golf equipment	4437	3505
golf courses	3272	2585
used golf clubs	2919	2306
golf carts	2591	2047
discount golf clubs	2498	1973
golf shoes	1892	1495

The Wordtracker program will also help you take advantage of common misspellings by showing you what they are for your important key phrases. You might see something like this:

Keyword Misspellings
golf clugs
golf glubs
golf equiptment
golf eqipment

Creating special entry pages to your website (doorway pages) that are optimized for keyword misspellings is a another great way to get additional traffic. A carefully optimized web page for a misspelled search phrase will often rise right to the top of the search engine results. I can tell you from first hand experience that lots of us misspell words and make typos when we are searching for something.

Choosing the Right Keywords for Your Own Website

If you can do any one thing to insure the success of your own website it would be to choose the right search key phrases that best represent your products and offering. You have to choose the right keywords!

Here is a prime example of me doing this all wrong. I own a website called American Horse Rider (http://www.americanhorserider.com.) I wanted to sell horse tack, horse gifts, horse classified ads, and horse training videos from this website. Being the bright guy that I am, I decided that, if I plan to ever sell anything, I had better attract people who own horses to this website. The first thing I did was research which horse-related words people with horses are searching for. The results of my research showed that horse owners were very interested in these subjects.

    Horse health
    Horse nutrition / feed
    Horse pasture / forage
    Horse care
    Horse tack / equipment
    Horse diseases
    Horse shoes / Hoof care
    Horse rescue / adoption
    Horse transportation
    Horse training
    Horse trainers
    Horse breeds
    Horse breeding
    Horse names
    Horse farms / ranches
    Horse barns / fencing
    Horse riding     Horse shows
    Horse tracks / betting

I figured, great! I gather up the best content I can lay my hands on about these horse subjects. Then I fix my web pages so they score very well on all of these very popular search phrases. Being the talented search engine optimizer that I am, in short order I am the #3 ranked website on Google for the term “horse information.”

This link below will show you where I am today. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=horse+information

I am at one point the 29th most popular website on the Internet out of 5,380,000 for the search term "horses". Now I think I am around #53.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=horses

My website is now getting around 1,200 unique visitors a day, with most of the people who are visiting actually being horse-owners. I decide now’s the time to add my horse tack store and my horse classifieds section and then retire on my earnings. I make a great affiliate deal with one of the best western tack stores on the Internet and I buy the very best Internet classified ad software available. I now have a great store and great place to put classified ads. I begin my wait for my first order to come in. I have so much traffic I know it will be any minute now.

Two weeks pass and I still haven’t gotten my first order. A month later and I still haven’t sold anything. I decide to call the guy who owns the horse tack store and ask him how his sales are. He tells me his sales are going great. I then decide to ask him what he thinks I am doing wrong with my store. He then in turn asks me how well I am placed in the search engines. I then list for him all of my top 10 Google positions for what I considered the best horse keyword phrases. He then casually mentions to me that in the list I just recited he didn’t hear a single keyword phrase for any of the horse products I sell.

That’s when it hit me. I chose the entirely wrong set of search phrases and theme for my web site. Yes, my visitors own horses, but they didn’t come looking to buy anything. They came looking for an entirely different solution to a problem that they did not need to buy horse tack to solve.

It is rather simple. If you don’t choose the right keywords, all of the highly effective search engine strategies you might employ won’t help you because those strategies are based upon choosing the right keywords. I never asked myself what someone might type in as a search phrase when they were looking to buy a new saddle or roping supplies. I was making a classic rookie mistake. I assumed all I needed to do was get visitors who owned horses to the web site and I would be able to sell my products. What I really needed to do was get visitors who were looking to buy a saddle or other horse tack and supplies. It really didn’t matter if they owned a horse or not, they just needed to be looking to buy my products.

Another common mistake is to use the name of your company as your main keyword. If your company has a well established brand like Kleenex, then that’s fine. Kleenex is used as a brand name and as a product name. But, if your company name is like the majority of companies on the web, optimizing your website around your company name rather than the type of product you sell is going to cost you a lot of business.

Find the most effective keyword phrase for your product or service.

My first problem with my horse web site is that I don’t own a horse. My second is that I don’t even know anything about horses. I should never have depended on myself to choose the right keywords. Even if you are an expert on your subject, people searching for your products and services almost never use the search terms you think they will. You need to consult someone outside of your immediate inner circle. Ask your customers what phrase they would use to find your particular product or service. Then don’t just believe the people you just asked and ask some more people. Keep asking people until you start to hear the same answers over and over. Those will be the search terms that people think they will probably be using, but don’t trust that they are actually using them. Take the list of these likely to be used search phrases and enter them one-at-a-time into the Overture search term suggestion tool and/or at http://www.wordtracker.org. These tools will show you how often these search terms have actually been used to look for your product or service in the recent past.

Each web page should have its own search term theme.

Search engines try to evaluate the focus of each page on your web site to determine a common theme. We call the focus or theme of a web its web page reputation. If you want to appear at the top of the search engines, create theme based pages. Don’t try to make a page have a reputation for more than one theme or search phrase.

An example of a poorly themed web page would be if you made a web page that talked about horse saddles and boot spurs on the same page. The reputation of that page would be cut in half. Half of the links pointing at that page would probably be about boot spurs and the other half about horse saddles. It’s like having a web page with a multiple personality disorder. Each page should be focused around one search phrase or theme. It’s alright to talk about 10 different boot spurs or 10 different saddles on one web page, but never saddles and boot spurs together. Isolate the words and search phrases people use when talking about or searching for a particular product or service. Use those words and phrases to fine tune the reputation of each web page.

This same rule also applies to your home page. Too many people try to stick every possible industry keyword that someone might ever think to use as a search phrase on their home page. This just doesn’t work. You end up creating a completely diluted page reputation for your home page. Pick one industry key phrase that you think, make that you know, will lead to sales. Base the theme of your home page around that one important key phrase.

The Internet is 3-dimensional like outer space. To be successful on the Internet, you have to step outside of your normal 2-dimensional thinking box. Just because most web sites only have one home page doesn’t make it a cosmic rule. The traditional home page styles you see on most web sites today come from a design concepts created by corporate art directors who couldn’t think outside of the box. Way too many web site owners assume that all of their visitors will enter their web site through their home page. In reality every page in your web site is a home page where visitors enter. Statistically speaking, anywhere from 30 to 60% of your web traffic will enter your web site from a page other than your home page whether you want them to or not. Next time you browse your own web site say this to yourself. What would I think and what would I do if this was the first page I saw on my web site? A huge number of web site owners will find the answer to that question frightening.

There are only two ways to try to control how Internet visitors will enter your web site. The first is to control the links that point into your web site. The second is to control the pages that are found when your niche audience type in their favorite search terms into their favorite search engine search text box.

To control the links that point to your web site you will have to pay close attention to your web site log files and use the various reverse search features of most search engines to find out who is linking to your web site. After you find these sites and links, work with those site owners to properly link to your web site.

For control problem number two you will have to be more creative. There is no rule that says you can have only one home page. The concept of what we call "doorway pages" is to keep copying your basic home page design and make new keyword optimized pages from that design based upon other popular and alternative keywords and phrases for your type of web site. The real trick is to make sure Google and the other search engines discover these other alternative doorway or home pages. One method to do this by directly submitting the page URLs using the each search engines "Add URL" page. We will discuss this and other alternative techniques in greater detail at another time.

Here is some advice for when you are creating the written content for your doorway pages. As you re-write the page titles, headlines, and page content from your original home page, make sure that you use all of the various forms of each keyword including plurals, and word combinations. For example, if the theme of my doorway page was based upon the keyword "truck", I might write a sentence like this: "I trucked down to the local Ford used truck dealer to see what kind of big trucks they had available to do commercial trucking." In the last sentence I used all of the popular forms of the word "truck" (trucked, truck, trucks, and trucking) along with at least six popular key phrases "Ford truck, used truck dealer, Ford used truck dealer, truck dealer, big trucks, and commercial trucking." With just a little bit of thought and keyword research, you can increase the relevancy and the opportunities for a page to be found with one well written sentence.

Think twice before competing for generic and all-purpose keywords.

It’s quite an ego booster to be in the top 10 listings for a really big search term. But, is it really worth the work and trouble? Lately, just for fun, I have been dabbling in the life insurance market. I wanted to see if I could win a top 10 position on what I call an "eat your young" search term. An “eat your young” search term is any term that gets tens of thousands of searches each month or even each day. The players (search engine optimizers) trying to reach the golden top 10 listings would "eat their own young" if it meant getting one more position higher in the rankings.

The second most popular search term in the insurance market is the word "insurance" by itself. More than 50,000 Internet visitors each day start out there quest for insurance information by using that term. The question is what are they really looking for when they use that search term? When you think about it, there is life, accident, car, homeowners, commercial, business, renters, FDIC, travel, dental, vision, flood, health, and boat insurance. This of course doesn’t include insurance departments, insurance agents, insurance programs, insurance brokers, insurance companies, and insurance associations, plus probably a bunch more I haven’t thought of. Most likely 90% of the time or more, the visitor who searched for the term "insurance" will not see in the first two ranked search results pages what he or she is looking for. You can almost be guaranteed the visitor will have to do a second or even third more refined search. The breadth of the search term "insurance" is great for an insurance company that sells every type of insurance possible, but for most niche insurance companies, their efforts to win on a more specific search term would be better spent on a more refined and niche search key phrase.

Your ideal (money making) search terms will not be single words like "insurance" but, multiple word phrases like "term life insurance quote online." Research has shown that search term phrases with four to five words are often the biggest money makers despite their low frequency of usage.

So, while having a web page that ranks exceptionally well for an all-purpose search term seems like the ultimate prize, bear in mind that you may be exposed to more visitors, but you won't automatically get more sales.

Your best search terms are the names of your individual goods or services.

The best search terms and keywords are often the names of the goods and services you wish to sell. Remember my mistake with the horse website? I focused on search terms of things that my audience would be interested in, but not what they were looking to buy. My best choices for search terms and keywords should have been “horse saddles” and “horse blankets.” These were the items I wanted to sell. But instead, like a fool, I used keywords like "horse diseases" and "hoof care." Not only were these phrases nothing my visitors wanted to buy, but they represented things my visitors wanted to avoid.

Don’t use trademarked terms and phrases as search terms and keywords.

A lot of books and so-called experts recommend that you use your competitor’s company names and products as keywords on your website. This can be a very risky proposition. You had better be ready to respond to a "cease and desist" letter from your competitor’s attorney if you get involved in this practice, especially if these terms are trademarked. Many affiliate programs have included specific clauses and exact instructions in the affiliate agreements about how their name and product names can and cannot be used. If you read some of these agreements closely you will find severe penalties for misusing these terms. Not only will you be removed from their affiliate program without receiving your commissions, but you may also be removed from the whole affiliate network such as Commission Junction or Performics. My suggestion is to read your affiliate agreements closely and avoid using your competitor’s trademarked company and product names altogether. A trademark lawsuit is not one of life’s experiences you need to experience.

Is your audience searching for your product or service regionally?

A lot of products and services are often best sold on a regional basis. Here are a few of the websites that I own where this is very true. I sell tourist activities in Hawaii such as snorkeling and biking trips. I sell online traffic school courses that remove negative driving points from your driving record. I promote laser eye surgery for near-sighted people. I help market real estate properties for several California cities. I help arrange transportation of horses from one location to another. I promote home mortgage loans and home refinancing.

Each of the above services may appear to be generic and available anywhere in entire United States but each of these things is best sold on a regional basis. Most web sites are competing for what they think are good keywords because they are the names of their product or service. In reality each of these services is best sold when connected with a regional name. Here is the list of the terms that 98% of websites with products and services like mine are competing for:

    Scuba diving
    Bike tour
    Traffic school
    Laser eye surgery
    California Real estate
    Horse transportation
    Mortgage loan
    Refinance home mortgage

The terms above seem to represent exactly my products and services and are actually the most searched on phrases for these types of services but there are a few catches. Here are a few of the reasons why these terms often don’t sell anything.

1. When people plan on going scuba diving they plan on going to a particular place. The same with bike tours.
2. You can’t just take traffic school any old place. The traffic school must be approved by the court where you received the traffic ticket.
3. Laser eye surgery has to be performed in an operating room somewhere close to where you live.
4. California is a big state and most people are only interested in purchasing property close to where they are employed.
5. Most horse transportation companies are small and originate most trips close to where they are located.
6. Mortgage loan agents have to be licensed for a particular state and need to often have face-to-face contact with their clients or physically visit the properties to be mortgaged or refinanced.

• Maui Hawaii scuba diving trip
• Hawaii big island bike tour
• San Diego traffic school
• Laser eye surgery Miami
• Alabama horse transportation
• Mortgage loan Atlanta
• Refinance home mortgage Indiana

Learn to quickly recognize when your product or service should be sold on a regional basis. This can be the difference between making money and not.

Learn the keyword language of your geographical region.

As I have been optimizing many of my web sites for certain keyword phrases, I have learned some hard lessons about regional dialects. For instance, when I was working on my traffic school web site, I first worked on the pages for the state of California, where I live. In California we call traffic school, of course, “California traffic school.” The next state I worked on was Florida, so I called it “Florida traffic school.” After that I went to work on Texas and called it “Texas traffic school”, but no one was visiting my Texas traffic school pages after I finished them. I quickly discovered that in Texas they call traffic school a “Texas defensive driving course.” Then I went on to work on Virginia, at first calling it Virginia traffic school, but I had the same problem as Texas. No one showed up at first. Well come to find out, in Virginia, traffic school is called a “Virginia driver improvement class.”

The more I worked on my traffic school project, the more I continued to discover more discrepancies with my use of regional language. What we call the “Department of Motor Vehicles” in California, Alabama calls the “Department of Public Safety”. In Delaware it’s the “Department of Transportation”, and in Florida it’s the “Department of Highway Safety”. Each state seems to have a different name for the place where they issue you your driver’s license and keep track of your traffic tickets.

Another funny thing I learned recently is that in the South (and I am not talking about southern California), people refer to the “shopping carts” that you find in supermarkets as “buggies.” The point of this discussion is that you need to learn the regional language of your business before you decide on what keywords to optimize your web site for. Anybody who believes that all Americans speak the same form of English has apparently never visited Alabama, Texas, Boston, and especially the New York Bronx.

Location, Location, Location

If I learned any lesson from eating Big Macs for the first part of my life, it’s that location counts. If you want to sell hamburgers put them where there are hungry people. Ask any realtor, its location, location, location. Now that we’ve discussed the various ways to choose your keywords, the following information will help you place your keywords throughout your web site, particularly in your web page HTML, where they will most help increase your web site’s relevancy and be easily devoured by hungry search engine spiders.