Selecting KEYWORD PHRASES

THINK KEYWORD PHRASES NOT JUST KEYWORDS

Once you have managed to collect a long list of keywords related to the subject of your site, or the products you are selling, you must link the keywords together and make keyword phrases.

Most people will be searching for two or three word phrases. The overall average search engine query is 2.1 words. Do not try targeting very general, single keywords. Those keywords will most likely not make it into a top #10 search engine placement anyway.

If you have a list of keywords like: "search engine, meta tag, promotion, software", try linking the keywords together like: "search engine software", "search engine promotion", "meta tag software" etc. Combining the keywords into keyword phrases will make it  easier to rank well, and you will be targeting your visitors more effectively.

The more specific your keywords are, the better the chances that people who search for them will actually benefit from your site's content. This is an important factor to consider when you are performing keyword analysis.

Misspelled keywords can be a waste of time, but there are exceptions to this rule. If you can find a popular misspelling, you have a very easily ranked keyword that will bring a lot of traffic.

Superlatives are another group of keywords usually not suitable for our purpose. Millions of competing pages are all claiming that their sites are "best," "amazing," "fantastic," "awesome," etc. However, nobody actually searches for such keywords. They are not suitable for keyword marketing.

And there is one more thing... "stop words". "These are common words that are usually ignored by search engines (like: a, an, and, for, the, of, that, it, to, if, you, etc). If your keyword phrase contains "stop words", it will be ignored.

How can you tell if a word is a stop word? Go to a search engine and search for this particular keyword. If the search engine tells you "no document matches your query," (or something similar) you will know this is a stop word for that particular engine.