A lot of fee-based and highly effective tools exist to help with this task. But for smaller organizations with smaller budgets, fee-based keyword selection tools might be out of reach. Luckily, some useful tools [>>]]]> Using keywords in your Web pages is the best method for boosting your SEO rankings, which makes the selection of those keywords very important.

A lot of fee-based and highly effective tools exist to help with this task. But for smaller organizations with smaller budgets, fee-based keyword selection tools might be out of reach. Luckily, some useful tools exist online for free. But they won’t do all of the work for you. Understanding how keywords work will help you use these tools to your best advantage.

Understand how users search with keywords
Let’s say you’re a moving company. You might naturally be drawn to the keyword (or more accurately, a key phrase) “moving services.” It describes what you do, right? Yes, but it also describes what a lot of other companies do. And anyone searching for moving services online will quickly come to the same conclusion.

The common behavior of a searcher will likely be to narrow their choices by selecting a more specific phrase, like “long-distance moving.” That’s your cue to do the same. Identify those aspects of your business that differentiate it from other businesses in the same industry. Do you specialize in moving large, bulky items? Maybe you focus on a specific geographic region? Maybe your prices are especially competitive? “Bulk moving,” “SF Bay Area moving,” or “cheap moving” might be good keywords to use.

Narrow your choices using selection tools
Once you’ve identified some specific keywords that accurately differentiate your business, then you can refine them using keyword selection tools, like Google’s Keyword Tool. Remember that this tool is based on actual searches—the keywords that people are entering into the search engine. These tools are helpful because they provide a picture of what words and phrases people are actually using to find information—not what you think they’re using or what you’d like them to use.

Let’s say for example that you’ve identified “long-distance moving” as one of your keyword differentiators. Plug that into Google’s Keyword Tool to see how well the variations of that keyword are ranking. You may find that “long-distance mover” is used more frequently than “long-distance moving,” which would make it a stronger keyword to use.

You can also get a sense of how much competition exists for specific keywords. Keywords that rank high in the tool are used frequently, which means there may be a lot more competition for getting your audience’s attention using that keyword. In that case, further refining your keyword to be more specific might help more people find your particular company. In this case, “long-distance moving services” might help differentiate you from people just looking for tips or general information on “long-distance moving.”

Find complementary tangential keywords
Once you’ve identified a few primary keywords that describe the core of your offering, you’ll want to broaden your search possibilities by adding some tangential keywords. Google’s Wonder Wheel is a great tool for helping with this.

The Wonder Wheel provides a visual representation of searches that are related to your primary keyword, which will show you what people also searched for, along with your primary keyword.

Once you’ve entered your primary keyword in the Google search engine, you can access the Wonder Wheel by clicking “more search tools” in the left column. You’ll find the Wonder Wheel option under the “standard view” subhead.

Sticking with the “long-distance moving services” example, we can see that people also searched for “long-distance truck rentals” and “long-distance moving containers.” If either of these are part of your business—perhaps you also provide truck rentals, or the moving container is included in your service fee—you might use these keywords to capture any traffic that may have searched those terms instead of your primary keyword.

Provide a focused keyword “array”
The overall goal is to identify a group of three to five keywords that accurately represent your business offerings. Your selections should represent your core business offerings, as well as significant related offerings that would be valuable to your audience.

Online tools can help you refine these selections to match the terms and language that your audience is actually using. But understanding how to use these tools effectively is an important part of not just getting the rankings that you want, but in attracting the audience that you want as well.

Have any of your own selection tips to offer? And what tools are you using? I’d love to hear from you.

This may be really, really old news to some (circa 1999 anyone?). But judging from the long string of responses to the Google post, it was indeed news to many people. And the practice of including keyword meta tags is clearly [>>]]]> It’s finally official: Google ignores keyword meta tags. Here it is from the horse’s mouth.

This may be really, really old news to some (circa 1999 anyone?). But judging from the long string of responses to the Google post, it was indeed news to many people. And the practice of including keyword meta tags is clearly still widespread.

Yet, the Google announcement does beg the question: If these tags are being ignored by Google, are you wasting your time by including them?

I think not. Selecting a few strong keywords or key phrases just isn’t that time consuming, so you’re not losing much by including them. And the increase in file size of individual pages is negligible. Even if your keyword meta tags aren’t directly enhancing your search rankings on Google, there are still come compelling reasons for including them:

1)      Google isn’t the only game in town. Other search engines, such as Yahoo and Bing, could still be using keyword meta tags. Regardless of what you may have heard through the grapevine, short of an official announcement, there’s no reason to believe other search engines aren’t using keyword meta tags.

2)      Keyword meta tags won’t harm your rankings. If you follow the traditional SEO best practice of including five to seven keywords in your keyword meta tags, you certainly aren’t going to harm your rankings on Google, or any other search engine. If you try sneaky things like stuffing your meta tags with competitor keywords and that sort of thing, you may indeed harm your rankings. But following the straight and narrow path won’t hurt you—and it may help your rankings on other search engines.

3)      Keywords can help with internal sorting and search. You may want to build your own internal search engine for your site, and using keywords is certainly easier than configuring the sophisticated algorithms that Google uses. And in some cases, building your own search engine may be preferable than using an embedded Google search function. If you want people searching for keywords such as “human resources” or “jobs” to land on the same page, your own search engine might serve those needs better.

4)      Keywords help you keep your content focused. I saved this one for last because I think it’s actually one of the best reasons for keeping keywords. Selecting three to five strong keywords before you even start writing your page will help you keep that content narrowly focused on the topic. Incorporating those keywords into your copy will go even further to keep you focused. In addition, repeating keywords into your copy will improve your search rankings. Not because a search engine is looking at your keyword meta tags, but because it’s scanning the content on the page. And if it contains a few keywords tightly focused on your topic (and that match the language of your users), your page will rank higher.

So, what do you think about using keyword meta tags? Do you still use ‘em? Been omitting ‘em for years? In either case, what are your reasons?