Choosing The Best Keywords To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Getting a website to appear in the first page of search engine results is a common goal for most webmasters, yet few possess the skills to actually achieve it. There are many steps to take in order to be found for terms related to your site, and taking your time to research the best possible phrases for your site is an important step on the ladder.

Many webmasters make the mistake of assuming that a ranking for one generic term related to their site will turn their website into a profitable success. Although that one generic term may provide a good stream of traffic and brand awareness, this doesn’t mean the traffic will convert into sales or leads, and the costs of targeting that term will tower over your return on investment. It is best for the webmaster to target multiple terms that not only drive traffic, but also lead to that all important conversion.

First of all you need to consider who your target audience is and the purpose of your site. Do you sell products online? Do you offer services? Is it more content focused? There are all sorts of potential visitors which will have varying ways of finding your site, so understanding your audience, and the reasons they will visit, will help focus your efforts.

With this in mind, you can now consider those generic terms that you think people will use to try and find your site. It shouldn’t just be one term - a trap that many webmasters fall into is assuming that one term will provide enough traffic to sustain business and are surprised that business doesn’t increase if they do achieve that ranking. Consider all of the possible phrases and themes of your site, even using a thesaurus to find related terms or checking competitor websites for ideas. It can be surprising just what terms your potential visitors will be using!

Once you have put together a list of short generic terms, you can start using tools to gauge how popular and competitive those terms are, and also refine those generic terms to be more targeted to your site’s purpose. The first step is to find out the popularity of terms, which can be done using various keyword suggestion tools.

Keyword suggestion tools tell you which terms were typed into searches, and how many searches were conducted on those terms. Typing a phrase in and will return a selection of alternative phrases that contain your generic term, alternative suggestions with a similar theme and also an estimate of how much traffic the phrase provides per month. These tools can be flawed as they query different search engines and the traffic estimations can be inaccurate, but they are still good for getting a ball park estimation of the amount of searches conducted, and for suggesting multiple terms you may never have thought of targeting.

The Overture Keyword Tool, located at inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/, is free to use and gives you a list of suggested terms as well as the amount of searches conducted on the Yahoo! Search Marketing network during the last month (Yahoo! Bought Overture and rebranded it Yahoo! Search Marketing).

A similar tool is located at www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the meta search engine Dogpile so may not be representative of what is being searched on the web as a whole, but is still good for suggesting alternative phrases and related phrases. Wordtracker has a subscription service, with which you can order between one day and one year’s access.

Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery at www.keyworddiscovery.com is a relative newcomer to the keyword suggestion market. KeywordDiscovery can query multiple search engines across the world and provides similar results to Overture and Wordtracker.com as well as other services, but with subscriptions starting at $32.50 per month this premium option is geared more towards search marketing professionals.

The next step in picking the best terms is checking how competitive they are. Ideally you want to find terms that have high volume traffic but few websites competing to rank for that term, and you can use various tricks to judge this. Any page that is optimised for a term will at least have that term in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site, so by going to Google and using the queries intitle:“phrase here” and inanchor:“phrase here”, you can figure out how many other pages have optimised for your chosen phrase. The lower the number for these searches, the less competitive the term is. For more information about what these Google advanced search operators do, go to www.google.com/help/operators.html.

Using these tools should have now provided you with a list of terms that are much more targeted than your original generic phrases. These can include breaking your term down by geographical location, or a specific product. You will be able to optimise your site for multiple phrases – remember that search engines index web pages and not just websites. That means all of the pages in your site can be found in search engines, which in turn means all of those pages can be optimised for different terms!

You may also want to consider the “long tail” of search phrases. These are obscure multi word phrases that are only searched a couple of times, but are so specific they can end up being the most targeted terms and carry with them higher conversion rates. The best way to target the long tail is to have a content rich site – the more content you have the more likely you are to be picked up for obscure terms that can be found in your copy.

So you should now finally have a list of the best possible targeted phrases for your website! As you can see, the process of choosing your keywords isn’t something that should be taken lightly, and there is a lot of work to do if you want to maximise the ability of your site to attract natural search traffic. With your final list you will now be ready to optimise your pages to be found for those terms, but that is for another time...

How To Convert More Website Visitors Into Customers

You are fighting some tough obstacles to get a website visitor to respond to your company.  These include the short attention span of the web, you being one of hundreds of websites they can visit, and the visitors having seen thousands of websites already.

In analyzing the 25 most successful websites we’ve written for our clients, here are the 9 big-picture secrets to having a website that gets you maximum conversions, leads, sales and profits.

1. Your website needs a headline that is very specific, unique, remarkable and features a mouth-watering customer-benefit.
   
Generalities in your headline and website will kill your response.  People have heard general statements hundreds of times before, so they have no power:

“lowest prices” … click away;
“great services” … click away;
“industry leader” … click away.
    
2. Develop instant credibility on the first page of your website by using logos of well-known customers, membership associations, years in business, etc.

The internet is a phenomenal tool because it literally puts the world at your fingertips.  The problem is that there are a lot of crooks, cheats and nuts in the world who could all have web sites.

You need to make sure your visitors instantly know that yours is a legitimate, professional business.  This not only puts their minds at ease, but it removes a huge obstacle they might otherwise have to doing business with you.

3. Get to the point on the first VISIBLE screen.

The key here is VISIBLE.  This means make sure your visitors know EXACTLY how you will solve their problems and meet their needs BEFORE they ever touch a scroll bar. There is nothing more aggravating than a site that forces you to link and scroll before you can even figure out if they can meet your needs.

Think about it:  do you take the time to dig through one web site when you can GOOGLE thousands or millions of other sites that also claim to have what you need?  Neither will your prospects.  If people have to go hunting, they will simply move on.

Two other important tools that can help turn visitors into buyers are a site search, and easy-to-find contact information.  You want to make sure no one visits your site without INSTANTLY knowing you WANT to help them and YOU can solve their problems.

4. Make a free or special introductory offer. 

You need to get the website visitor to DO SOMETHING NOW … IMMEDIATELY! Because if they don’t, they’re gone … and you’ve lost your opportunity.  (When we added a free evaluation offer to our Profit Boosters Copywriting website, our response rate tripled.)
 
5. Offer a free eNewsletter sign-up.

This is a must.  Give it a good name, offer free special reports along with it and push your privacy policy.  You must capture your visitor emails and follow up with helpful information to them on a regular basis.

And don’t worry about writing your eNewsletter.  You obviously have a passion and expertise for your business, or you wouldn’t be in it.  Just write about what you know, using your own words. 

Here’s another important related tip:  don’t try and impress anyone with technical jargon and flowery language.  Pretend you’re writing a letter to help out a good friend.  That’s the perfect tone for your eNewsletter.

6.  Focus on the message, not the technology.

With a media as technology-driven as the internet, it’s unbelievably easy to get caught up in all the latest bells and whistles.

But remember, people are visiting your site because they WANT something … NOT because they want to be impressed by how much technology you’ve packed onto your site.

Your headline is still the key (see tip number 1 again) to driving business.  And whether you use the latest technology, or plain old text, EVERYTHING on your site should point your prospect to a BENEFIT only YOU can provide.

Here’s another good reason to hold back on the tech stuff a bit:  not all new technology is ACCESSIBLE or ACCEPTED by most users right away, or even at all. To reach the largest audience, wait until a technology is generally accepted by users and developers so they’ll already have, or be willing to download the necessary components to view your site. Some examples of this are:

•    java applets
•    activex controls
•    shockwave objects
•    tools that require plug-ins
•    specialized document formats

7. Keep it simple.

One common mistake is to overdo the graphics.  Web design programs make it so easy to add graphic elements that they’re sometimes hard to resist.  Remember, just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
Try the “Squint Test”.  Look at your web page and kind of squint your eyes.  Do you see a main thought and graphic … or do you just see a bunch of colors, shapes, patterns, boxes and flashes?
As a rule of thumb, anything that diverts your attention to ITSELF as a graphic element and AWAY from the MESSAGE of your main benefits, is probably overdone.

Some common things that get overused are:
•    excessive graphics
•    frames
•    background images
•    bevels and other graphic tricks

Keep in mind that overdoing it can be more than just a visual problem.  Too many graphics and frames can bog down a page or make it too difficult to navigate.  Either way, you’ve lost your prospect for good.

8.  Give prospects a reason to visit your site.

The #1 reason people visit web sites is for information. So, in addition to making sure they know you can solve their problems, give them some information.

Good examples of things you can easily “give away” on your site include free marketing tips, a how-to section, or tips for buying your product or service.  You don’t have to give away the farm.  Just give some helpful tidbits that show people you know what you’re talking about.  All of these things will build your credibility and generate business for you.

9.  Give both customers and prospects a reason to want to visit your web site again.

Studies show that people usually won't buy from you until they visit your site four to five times.  You can help that process along tremendously by giving people a reason to return to your site.

Some ways to do this include updating product or service information, timely/seasonal how-to tips, changing your offer, changing your free premium, upgrading or updating samples and demos.  These are all good reasons for people to return to your site or maybe even bookmark it.

A good rule of thumb would be to update your site in some way at least once a month, even if the changes are minimal. Not only will it give your visitors a reason to return, it will help drive new visitors to your site since search engines re-index/re-catalog changed pages.