WK 13: Choosing Keywords

Choosing Keywords
Keywords are words that people use to find your website. Keywords are the words entered into the search field of a Search Engine to search for website pages related to or including those words. For example, if you are looking for blue shoes, you would type “blue shoes” into a Search Engine and find websites related to “blue shoes”. The phrase “blue shoes” is called a keyword phrase. To increase your Search Engine traffic you should choose a 1-3 word keyword phrase for each individual page of your website. You also should choose two or three keyword phrases that constitute the overall theme of your website.

Methods of Choosing Keywords
a. Google® Sandbox Tool will return a list of words it believes are related words. Other websites including, NicheBot, and Wordtracker offers a similar service as well.

b. Look at your competitors websites, and determine what keywords they are targeting. One method of doing this is to take a look at their keywords meta tag. In Internet explorer you can do this by:
1. Clicking on the top pulldown menu “View”.
2. Scrolling down and click on the menu item “Source”.

Once you have your list of keywords it's time to find out if anyone searches for them. You can do this by using the Overture® search term suggestion tool. The Overture® search term suggestion tool shows you how many times a certain keyword was searched for the previous month. You can use this tool to find out how many times people search for keywords related to your website. For example, go to the Overture® search term suggestion tool and type in “dinosaur”. Then click the button to the right. You will now see a screen that shows a big table of keyword phrases that include the word dinosaur. Here is an example snippet of the list for September 2004:
109644 dinosaur
15899 dinosaur picture
8433 dinosaur costume
5548 dinosaur game
5419 barney the dinosaur
5018 dinosaur fossil
4575 dinosaur toy
The number to the left is the number of times people searched for a particular keyword. The words to the right of the numbers are the keyword phrases that were searched for.

Reference site: http://www.outsourceseo.in/choosing-keywords.htm
http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter148.htm
http://www.webpronews.com/ebusiness/sitepromotion/wpn-3-20040826WhatisTheGoogleSandboxEffect.html