KEY WORDS - SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - HIGH RANKING PAGES

These are buzz phrases that are being tossed about on a daily basis as it relates to websites and blogs.

We are all trying to find the key to unlock the door to our web visibility success. Today's Word Tracker e-zine includes an article called Choosing Your Best Key Words..

In the article, author Ken McGaffin speaks to the three strategies for a notive SEO:

1. Include the most popular keywords in your website copy, even though you may not rank well for them. Your customers will expect to see these keywords, and search engines will take note of them. By including them, you lay a foundation for the long term - slowly but surely as you add more content, your rankings will rise.
2. Use the most popular keywords along with 'qualifiers', either geographic or sector specific. So while it might be difficult to rank well for 'chocolate gifts', it is not such a challenge to rank well for 'chocolate gifts Buffalo' targeting a geographic area or 'corporate chocolate gifts' targeting the business sector.
3. Look for niche keywords or markets that others haven't yet found. Such keywords have the magic combination of being relatively popular searches, but having little competition. Wordtracker provides a measurement for this - KEI or keyword effectiveness index. Many SEOs adopt this niche keyword strategy: John Alexander and robin Nobles explain the approach in detail in this excellent article - An Ingenious Way to Use Wordtracker.

I would add another point:

THINK LIKE YOUR READER.

In order to find the right key words, you must first get in the mind of your potential prospect. What are they thinking and therefore typing into the search engine that will lead them to you. What problems are they experiencing - what service do they need, what product must they have to make their lives easier.

And then - what would they type in to find it?

Along those same lines - how might they MIS-SPELL the word(s)?

In your industry is there a word that is consistently mis-spelled? Consider using a mis-spelled version within your website so that you become visible to the spelling-challenged readers.