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Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! The Internet. Finding the right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be of interest to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or seeing any real profits from the visitors who arrive – decreases dramatically.

The keywords you become the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You may think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you have not followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you’re right in the middle of your business network, which is the reason that you might not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You should be able to think like your customers. And because you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go straight to the source.

Instead of plunging and write to the list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find that your understanding of your business and understanding your customer is significantly different.

Consumers are an invaluable resource. You’ll find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keywords to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The purpose of evaluation is to narrow your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean consumers are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise on your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. More popular your keyword is, the more likely possibility that will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will assess the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of words and phrases. The higher the number this software gives to a particular keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. Error only with this concept is more popular keywords are, the greater the search engine position you will need to get. If you go down at the bottom of the search results, consumers will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity is not enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You should move to the next criteria, which is specificity. More specific your keywords, the more likely that consumers are ready to purchase goods or services you will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The “automobile body shops” keyword will be ranked lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but nevertheless will serve you better. Instead of getting to kill people who are interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with the front end of the trash or crumpled fenders directed to your site. In other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Again, this requires putting yourself in the minds of consumers rather than sellers to find out what the motivation to ask someone looking for a service or product to type a certain word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, as consumers who are looking for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you had to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you’re looking for a specific type of job, which keyword would you type? The second, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their careers, have the necessary experience, and ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who casually trying to figure out what to do with his life among the party- the beer. You want to find people
are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific phrases and directly targeted to bring the most motivated traffic to your site.

After you choose your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, remember that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You can not rely on log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many visitors you actually make a purchase.

Fortunately, several new tools have been created to help you assess the effectiveness of keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. It allows you to see which keywords bring you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your form, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the effectiveness of a keyword or phrase, and must hold your sword when disposing of and replacing the keywords that are ineffective or inefficient keywords that bring better profit.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and that! But to tell you the amount of effort put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business in return ‘.