Choosing the Right Keywords
Author: Geraldine Jensen

One of the most difficult parts of setting up a website, and marketing it, concerns determining the best keywords to use. When choosing key words try to answer these questions. Do the keywords really best describe your site? (relevancy is a must for Goggle!). Do they tell the story about the products you are selling? Will they target the right customers? If you have a site, which is in a very competitive market you may have to be creative when choosing keywords. For example, Google returns, 594,000,000 possible pages for a search done on the word, software-- Oh My- How would anyone find a site in that crowd!.

Websites most easily found by search engines are niche sites where there are fewer choices. However, it is hard to be niche site when one is selling popular products! Or is it?

Try using keywords in your meta tags and on you website which are more exact and create a niche. For example, if you are selling advertising, try California Website Advertising. I found help to expand my keyword list, niche it, at wordtracker.com and goodkeywords.com and by using the Overture and Google Keyword Tools.

Frequency of keyword placement on a website is important. Use a keyword too many times and the search engines will think you are spamming it. If you use a keyword more than 5 times in the keyword meta tags, search engines consider it spam. But, it must appear at least four times on a page to be picked up as an important keyword by the search engines. Placing keywords as the name of a link and as headlines placed between headline codes, H1 and /H1 is important. If this takes up too much space because the font is too large reduce the size inside the H1 and /H1 tags by using font tags.

Mark Horrell's Keyword Density Analyzer very helpful. It will tell you which words, and frequency of each word, that the search engine robots will see when it visits your website. With this information, you are abe to determine it you have optimized you site appropriately. See for more marketing tips.

About the author: Geraldine Jensen is the owner of several ecommerce websites. She is the publisher and editor of http;//www.familiesonlinemagazine.com, which was chosen as Hotsite by USA Today in October 2004 due to it diverse opinions and good content. She was Webmaster for a nonprofit organization for 10 years. Her newest project is Today's Family Forum.