Good Search Engine Listing - Part 2

The first thing you need to do is decide what search terms you would like your site to be found under. Make a list of 30 - 50 different phrases that you think someone would use if they were looking for a site like yours or for the products you sell or the services you offer. Those phrases should consist of 2, 3, 4, or possibly 5 words in each phrase. Those phrases are called keyword phrases. Your list can and should contain variations of the same phrase, such as plurals or compounded words. An example of this would the phrases search engine listing and search engine listings. The "s" can sometimes make a big difference in the amount of traffic you'll get from a particular listing.

Next, you need to find out how many of the keyword phrases on your list are ones that other people have actually searched for recently. Just because you think they are good doesn't mean that the general public will use them. So you need to do some investigating to weed out the bad ones.

*Note - When making your keyword phrase list you should be realistic in the search terms you are targeting. If your business is service related and you can only provide that service to a limited geographic area then the location of that area (city, county, state, region, etc.) should be included in your keyword phrases. It makes no sense to try and compete for keywords targeted by national companies if you can't provide the service on a national level. Instead you want to target location specific keywords and then you'll have alot less competition for them.

Currently there are only a few ways to find out if the keyword phrases on your list are any good. There are tools available that can access the databases of the major search engines and tell you approximately how many searches were done for any particular keyword phrase during the previous 30 - 60 days. The best tool is totally free, for now.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You simply enter one or more of your keyword phrases into the tool and it basically tells you all the information you need to know to determine whether the phrase is worth targeting or not. If it is not, then you'll also see numerous alternatives in the results that may be more worthwhile. This tool is currently free to access by clicking here.

Enter all of your keyword phrases and write the number of times it was searched for on your list next to each phrase.

Aother tool that many professional webmasters like to use is called WordTracker. It provides results in a similar way as the Google tool does, but in addition it combines them in a report with the results of the next step in your lesson. WordTracker also gets its information from a variety of search engine databases. However, WordTracker is a little more difficult to use and it only offers a free trial with limited results information. To get the most out of it you'll want to use the paid version. We tried it and were impressed by the results. But it took us some time to learn how to best use it and we decided to just stick with the Google tool for now since it is still free. You should check it out and also bookmark the page for future use in case Google starts charging to use their tool. Click Here For The WordTracker Homepage.

Hopefully you now have your list of 30 - 50 keyword phrases with the number of times each phrase was searched for during the previous calendar month. Any phrase that was searched for 30 times or less should be scratched off your list. Optimizing any part of your site for those keyword phrases would be a waste of your time since their average potential visitor count for any given month would be less than 1 visitor per day. Now re-write your list with the remaining phrases and put them in order from most searched to least searched.

You are now ready for the next step toward getting good search engine listing placement. The next step is determining how many other sites are competing for each phrase remaining on your list.

Click Here to learn how to gauge your competition - Part 3