Website Design
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Choosing Keywords

A Keyword is merely the term used on the internet for the words a person types into the search field of a search engine, like Yahoo or Google. For example, John decides to see if he can get a new Ferrari steering wheel at a better price on the internet than at the local Ferrari dealership. So he types in Ferrari Steering Wheel, as his search term. As you can imagine he could end up with a wide variety of sites that are not related to his goal, as most Search Engines will return a mixture of the 3 words used and the words may be in various orders. He should of placed " " around his enquiry like so; "Ferrari Steering Wheel". Which tells the Search Engine only to display Web sites with the exact phrase, Ferrari Steering Wheel in them, and in that exact order. Using, "QUOTATION MARKS" , will work with most Search Engines.

As you can guess, John will have a lot better chance of finding relevant information regarding his Ferrari Steering Wheel by searching the second way, compared to the way he did in my example.

Ok, this has the same implications for us, as Web Site owners. It may be fine to try and optimize our web site for, Ferrari, Steering and Wheel, keeping with the same example as above, only now we are the Web Site Merchant trying to sell Ferrari Steering Wheels. As you can guess not many people would be looking to buy such a specific and I imagine expensive Steering Wheel for their pick-up or the family car. So we are now in a Niche market, and as with all niche markets there is less of a demand for our specific product, also the people who are usually looking to buy our product have a very specific item in mind.

Sounds harder than a General product, and it can be when you look at your ROI ( Return On Investment), which should be looked at before choosing a product to sell or promote, things to look at are Historical Search Volume for your item, Existing Competition as well as the Profit Per Sale you will make while being competitive with others in your field. Just to name a few things, but we will assume for our example that we have done our Due Diligence and are happy to sell Ferrari Steering Wheels. Just a quick point on researching your product, as we are using Ferrari Steering Wheel as a product example, I looked for Ferrari Steering Wheel at Overture and there were no searches made at Yahoo, for that phrase during the previous month. Yet for Ferrari by itself there were 116.206 searches made and then smaller search volumes for the various Ferrari models. So be precise when doing your research or you may end up wasting your time and effort, by working off of false assumptions.

That sort of killed my example, so lets work with some fake data, for the purpose of our Ferrari Steering Wheel Company, we will say that there was some Search Volume and that there was actually 2100 Searches made for Ferrari Steering Wheel the previous month and looking at Historical Data we can see that this is usually about the same each month. Best place for Data that I know of is Wordtracker.

Sorry, will get on track here. Ok so like I originally said we want to attract people to our web site that want to buy Ferrari Steering Wheels. So we will do our research and only optimize our web site for the Keywords which we can see from the historical data people have used to search for Ferrari Steering Wheels. Seeing as there was no search data I will make it up, we will want terms like.

Ferrari Steering Wheels, Buy Ferrari Steering Wheels, 2004 Ferrari Enzo Steering Wheel.

The more precise you are with your keyword research, and optimizing your web site for those Keywords and or Key Phrases, the more targeted your (visitors) traffic will be. Which will result in a higher conversion rate per Visitor. Also there is no point in trying to be Number 1 at Google for a term as vague as Steering Wheel, for example, as well over 99% of the people using just Steering Wheel, as their keyword, will not actually own a Ferrari. You are better off aiming at a smaller and much more refined group of keywords, which are directly related to your product. Now that you have your main keywords picked out you can aim for the top of the search engines with less effort and better results than optimizing for the wrong Keywords.

Think of keywords as invitations, send out the right message and you will attract the right people. Find the right  keywords or key phrases, for your product or service and you will get targeted traffic visiting your website who want to buy from you. But if your keywords are too general or misleading, the possibility of actually making any real profits from the visitors that do arrive - decreases dramatically. Also in the above, Ferrari Steering Wheel example, if you were to pursue selling such a product, you of course would look for other products that compliment you main product. Such as other Ferrari car parts for example, also a free online membership site exclusively for Ferrari Owners may be a good idea, as you would already have most of the Ferrari Owners there, if your site was popular enough, that is. Then you would be the first port of call if they need a particular part for their car, if your prices and customer service was done well. Or you may want to branch out and cover only steering wheels, but from every manufacturer and supply everyone.

One last point, which I must confess I have fallen over on, big time!

Internal navigation. As I have mentioned above, choosing your keywords carefully to draw your targeted audience to your web site to start with, is crucial. If you carry that theme through to the Internal Navigation of your web site, you will benefit greatly from it, almost immediately. A well laid out Internal Navigation structure will allow you to offer more of your services to the potential client Right Now!

Right Now! is an important point, as they are at your web site. Right Now!

If you were in a Physical Shop and a customer came in, you can go up and ask the customer if they need a hand and was there something in particular they were looking for? Depending on their answer, you would do your best to meet their request, either by supplying the item they were asking about or directing them to the product you carried which may be an adequate replacement, if you had anything like that. Either way, there is a chance that you may make a sale. You definitely have the chance to make some sort of human contact in a physical store, also there is a remote possibility that the person entering the store will stick their head in for ten seconds, and if not impressed, leave!

They do on the Internet.

Statistically, you have ten seconds to grab a web surfers attention, before they click off of your site in search of another. Which is why your Headlines are so important. If you can grab their attention long enough, they may read the first paragraph then if what you have to say is interesting they may stay and read on further. Next time you arrive at a web site that is not that interesting, try and catch what are the last things you look at before you click out of there. If you are like myself, it will be a quick cursory look on arrival and if nothing catches your attention you will already be gone, if it was, this might be interesting, but your not to sure yet, you will be dragging down the scroll bar while scanning the terrain, if something catches your attention you may back up a bit and read it from where it started. If it was not as promising as first thought you will be heading for the back button with your mouse in hand while your eyes are taking in the left hand navigation on their way to co-ordinate the mouse's cursor with the final click out of there. It is natural to be hoping that there is something of interest here, up until departure, after all that is why we clicked on the web site in the first place.

So Internal Navigation, Clear and Captivating Headlines are Important. I can see I am going to have to re-do my whole site after writing this.

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