ARTICLE
SEO and You
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a wonderful facet of working online. By selecting keywords you can increase blog traffic, get more hits for your online shop, or even get a few new users for a message board. How do we go about using keywords though? Thankfully, with many online tools available it’s easier than ever to use keywords to your advantage.
Take a Look at the Competition
Competing websites use similar keywords. Increasing web site traffic relies on search engines primarily to get results for the page through your search of choice. But by choosing selectively what keywords to include in the main body of your page, you can place yourself in a super competitive field. An easy way of going about this would be to take a selection of phrases to Google’s free Keyword Tool and see the resulting hits for the most popular phrases. Using a variety of phrases ranked by popularity and trending visibility can place you in a better position after all, so it’s best to see how it ranks in for online searches per month.
When selecting phrases to input, make sure to be thorough and use a bit of common sense. Using static phrases that don’t sound right will severely hinder any progress you’re trying to make. Instead using common phrases that sound good without context seems to be the key to success. Marketing online relies on these common phrases to get traffic, and without a substantial flow you may find your online ventures to be severely limited. It comes down again to taking a good hard look at your competition and figuring out how to position yourself to take advantage of trends they use. After all, if they’re able to have thousands of unique users daily you can easily do the same with a little hard work.
How to Implement Keywords
Keywords and tags seem to be a nasty little thing to implement for someone just starting out with their own page. My girlfriend is opening her first online shop, and I’ve gotten to see first hand the type of marketing in a rather cutthroat field. Customers and potential users respond to how easy it is to find the product or information they’re looking for, and to take advantage of that relates to my next point. Throwing in keywords is a bit like using salt in a dish, too much and it ruins the whole thing. So what you have to do is to spice it according to taste as it were, inserting key phrases but making it sound like something a human being put together rather than ad bots looking to get traffic by underhanded tactics.
Taking a look at keywords and seeing how you can apply them is a bit of an art as it were. With the online marketplace booming and an integral part of business these days, we have to look and see what it means to successfully market yourself online. Keywords help in this regard because using them for various facets of your page means you enable yourself the potential for a greater userbase. A greater userbase means more traffic obviously, but it can also lead to a greater source of revenue.
It comes down to this, when you’re looking at your selected keywords, you have to use them a bit like phrases in elementary school. This means figuring out how to place them in a sentence without making it sound forced. It also means being able to judge exactly how much you’re using in any given piece. You can also place keywords in the metatags of your site, which can increase site traffic as well. Overusing keywords in a metatag can be hazardous though, Google and like minded search engines will ban any site that overuses them by spamming them.
SEO is Just a Start
SEO can really help your site grow, but it comes down to other factors like the overall design of your page. Having a bunch of text for content that uses keywords is good in theory, but without a strong design that is aesthetically pleasing you’ll be setting yourself up for disappointment. So take into consideration what you’re working with, and be sure to put the work into your site to make it a success. The free Google tool is in the link provided, so be sure to test out your phrases and optimize them as necessary.
