Keywords and keyphrases
How to choose the best ones for your site

Looking at keywords
Imagine that there is a business in Palm Springs that produces and sells jelly cups, called "Granny's Wobbly Bits". We'll call her Marcie. Marcie has decided that it's time to take her business online.
Before starting to write the content for her website, Marcie should sit down and draw up a storyboard for her site. She needs to work out what she wants on each page, and then brainstorm the keywords for each page.

Let's take a look:

HOME PAGE Business name: Granny's Wobbly Bits Product: Gourmet jelly cups, children's jelly cups, party jelly cups. Other information: Home delivery service, home made jelly using all natural ingredients, situated in Palm Springs, delivers to Palm Springs only.

Possible Keywords: Jelly, Jelly cups, jelly cups for parties, party jelly cups, desserts, sweets, parties, party, children's parties, kids parties, gourmet jelly, gourmet, home delivery, desserts home delivery, home made, natural, natural ingredients, Palm Springs

Looking at 'naming your website pages'
Each page of a website needs to have a name. If you look in the address bar at the top of this page, you'll see: make-website.com/key-words-and-key-phrases.php
Okay, back to Granny's Wobbly Bits...
On Page 2 of the site, Marcie wants to feature her range of delicious gourmet jellies.

But how should Marcie name her pages to maximize chances of her pages being listed by the search engines? Let's have a look:

grannyswobblybits.com/page2	Naming the second page, 'page2' tells a search engine nothing about what is on the page.
grannyswobblybits.com/gourm et-jellies	Naming the second page 'gourmet-jellies' tells a search engine there are gourmet jellies on this page. what: jellies what kind: gourmet

How to introduce a website
If possible, have the opening paragraph of your website explain everything about your site. People should not be left scratching their heads over what your website is all about. They may quickly leave your site if you don't grab their attention.

So -
- write an attention-grabber
- put in as much information as possible in the fewest amount of words
- free offers or special offers are always good
- remember to use your your main keyphrases

Granny's Wobbly Bits Home delivered, all natural ingredients	This description is useless. It tells an internet user or search engine nothing.
Granny's Wobbly Bits Home delivered jelly cups, 100 varieties, all natural ingredients. Children's jelly cups. Gourmet jelly cups. Here in Palm Springs.	This is okay. It mentions a few keywords - okay for search engines but boring for the people coming to the site.
Granny's Wobbly Bits Add pizzaz to your next party or function with delicious home made jelly cups. 100 exciting flavours - from Luscious Lime to Sizzling Strawberry, both children's and gourmet varieties. 100% natural ingredients. Delivered straight to your door. Home deliveries to locations all over Palm Springs.. Special offer - free delicious sample pack with your first order!	Much better!  It's people who will be coming to your website, so be sure to catch their interest on the very first page. You want those people to return and tell their friends about your site. The more times people return to your site, and the more people they tell about your site, the higher your site will rise in the search engine rankings as well. Keywords are used as main points in the text.

Other things a webmaster can do

Use long-tail keyword phrases in the URL. Long-tail phrases are, well, long. They aim to compete for very specific things. An example: grannyswobblybits.com/homemade-melon-jelly-in-palm-springs
If Marcie knows that there is a market for homemade melon jelly in Texas, she could well be capturing the market with that page URL.

Offer to link to other sites in return for a reciprocal link ( a link to your site placed on their website.) The other sites should have something in common with your website. Reciprocal links don't do a lot for optimization purposes, but they may bring you in customers - and that is a very good thing!

Write articles and place the articles in some of the better article sites - or even better - sites focused on the same theme as your website.

Advertise in your local area - newspapers, school newsletters.

Use internet advertising such as Google Adwords (this can quickly bring you targeted visitors to your site.)


Free resources from Google

Google trends
Google trends is a great tool that allows you to type in any word or phrase and see how popular it has been in google searches - for any year, any month, and different countries.
google.com/trends

Keyword tool
This tool from google allows you to type in your keywords and find all related keywords, how much advertiser compeition there is for those keywords, the search volume for those keywords and other information.
adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Keywords and keyphrases are the terms that best describe the content on each individual page of your website.

It is to your advantage to choose the phrases that web users would type into a search engine to find your type of product or service.  It's best best to target one to three key phrases for each page.

Looking at keyphrases

Now that Marcie knows which keywords best describe her business, she can expand these out into keyphrases. Keyphrases help web users to find a particular product, service, or information through a search engine.

Marcie can do this in a number of ways. The most popular method is to use a program which tells you what volume of search queries there are per day for a particular phrase.

A great free tool is the keyword suggestion tool at seobook.com.

Google Suggest is another free way of discovering popular search phrases.