Search Engine Optimization

Keywords & Keyphrases

A good search engine optimizer knows how important it is to use the right keywords. It is essential that you narrow the field.

For example: you sell cars. But what type of cars? Making "car" your keyword would be a mistake. Firstly, the field is so broad that the search result for "car" comes up with everything from "car yards" to "rental cars" to car magazines.

Narrow the field! What type of cars to you sell? Used cars? New cars? A particular brand? Where are you located? Where do you sell? You could come up with a couple of keywords: "used car sales" or more along the lines of a keyphrase: "used car sales Sydney" or "Sydney used cars for sale".

Keyword and Keyphrase Tips:

Try not to use highly competitive keywords

When constructing keywords think from your searchers point of view - what words would you type into the search field? What exactly are you looking for?

Do a search on the keywords you have come up with. What are the top search results? Are they your competitors? If they are, see what they use as their TITLE tag.

Never, ever list your keywords anywhere in your page content. This is called search engine "spamming" and is frowned upon. It is cheating and ethically inappopriate. Search engines are smart enough to find and eradicate sites that do this.

Fix the title and meta tags on each page to include the keywords specific to that particular page.

For example: for this page, "Keywords and Keyphrases", the title tag is "Keywords and Keyphrases for SEO - iPower Search" and the keyword meta tags include "keyword and keyphrase" and "keywords". It would be senseless to add keyword meta tags such as "copywriting" or "link popularity" in this page.