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Choosing the right keywords will be the determining factor in your search engine promotion listing/ranking. Pick the right ones and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. Choose the wrong ones and you’ll be crying all the way home (after closing your bank account).

Brainstorming For The Right Keywords

The first thing you want to do is sit down with a pen and paper and write down every single word that may be related to your product, service or business. Don’t take this lightly or brush it off. Your search engine ranking is dependant on your keywords!

Let’s stick with our car Web site example and come up with a few key words. How about:

• cars
• automobiles
• vans
• trucks
• Sports Utility Vehicles

The above keywords describe the products of your business, but they are a bit general. Let’s get specific and list some car manufacturers like:

• Nissan
• Toyota
• General Motors
• Lexus
• BMW
• Porsche

I’m sure you can list a few more manufacturers, but I think you get the point. Now, let’s take it a step further and get real specific by listing the model types:

• Altima
• Camry
• Corvette
• SC400
• 4Runner
• Boxster

So far you’ve got a fairly good list, but you need to go beyond that and use your imagination. What will your customers be looking for? What other words are related to cars?

Well, you can also list accessories like:

• turbo
• leather seats
• head lights
• steering wheel
• …and other related items

“What if I don’t sell those items?”

That’s a good question. Let’s say someone comes to your site looking for something that has to do with cars, but you don’t carry that specific product. The worse case scenario is that the customer leaves your site. Best case scenario is that the potential customer sees something else he likes and buys from you and/or he may refer your site to someone else.

Don’t limit yourself or your business by thinking, “What do I sell?” You must open up your mind and ask yourself, “What might my customers be looking for?”

Phrases

I don’t know about you, but when I’m searching for something on the Net, I usually type in a phrase rather than just one word. Statistically, more people narrow their searches by searching on two or more keywords in combination.

So, after you’ve written up your list of keywords, try to combine them into keyword phrases. Instead of Lexus or SC400, use Lexus SC400. Or Toyota Camry, Porsche 911 Turbo, BMW 540is, Toyota 4Runner SR5 4X4, etc.

Plurals And Longer Words

Always use the longer form of a word and then add an “S” at the end of it. In the exact words of Fred Marckini:

“In general, choose the longer form of a keyword. The reason is a concept called Word stemming. This can often pull in results that are not an exact match for what you searched for, but may be close or the same thing. When a search engine does use stemming or word stems, it means that searches for word roots will also include the variations of that word. For instance, searches for consult would also return documents that have the words consulting and consultants unless the user chooses to do an exact search.”

Also, most people usually search by using the plural of words (with an “s” at the end) - cars, automobiles, dealerships, etc.

Misspelled Keywords

Most people are poor spellers (myself included). Take advantage of this fact and include commonly misspelled keywords into your list. Also, when typing in keywords, many people are in such a hurry they accidentally hit the wrong vutton and nisspell words!

Your Location

Depending on what your product or service is, where you live may play a very important role in choosing additional keywords. For example, sticking with our car site, you may be located in the city of Van Nuys… which is located in Los Angeles County… which is located in the state of California.

All this matters because you’re going to have a very difficult time selling cars to people in Buffalo, New York! So, make sure you also brainstorm some keywords in regards to your state, city and even surrounding cities!

Avoid “Skip” or “Stop” Words

In order to speed up searches and save disk space, most search engines ignore common words (especially Internet-type words) like a, an, the, and, of, Internet, web, services, homepage, etc. These words are sometimes called “stop” or “skip” words because most search engines will “stop” indexing your page or “skip” that word in your title when indexing your site.

If your Web page contains one of these common “stop” words in areas where a robot spider looks for copy to index, the stop words may be “skipped” or ignored, possible effecting how you’re ranked on that search engine. Sometimes, your site may be placed in a wrong category.

For example, let’s say you want your site to be indexed as a “web advertiser”. Since “web” is a common word, many of the search engines will skip that word and index your site under advertising - not “web” advertising.

If you think one of your keywords may be a “stop” word, simply test it by going to AltaVista and typing it in. If nothing comes up or if millions of pages are registered, chances are you should find another word OR put that word in “quotes”.

Lower Case

One last note, some search engines are case-sensitive… so always keep your keywords in lower case letters. There are two reasons you should do this.

This first is that most people are typing in their keywords in lower case (unless they have “CAPS LOCK” on) and secondly, if they did happen to type in the words in upper case letters, the search engines will still find your lower case words and match them up - but not the other way around. (confused?…)

Example: if someone types in keyword “cars”, most search engines will pick up CARS, Cars and cars. But if keyword “CARS” was typed in, the search engine may only find a match for CARS, but not Cars or cars. Get it?… Good!

Testing Your Keywords

Now keep your list handy, visit all the major search engines and enter your keywords one by one to see what comes up in the search results list. Study a few of the top pages which will have a similar topic to yours, and see if there are any other good keywords/keyword phrases you could add to your list which you hadn’t thought of before.

Look at your competitors Title as well as their Description to find any new keywords. You could also look for these keywords by using your browsers “source code” for that Web page and taking a look at the META tags.

If you find any word that may be more targeted, simply write them down and add them to your list.

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