Going back to some of the SEO methods used in the past, some website owners were happy to fill pages with keywords that attracted search engines, but turned visitors off. Now even the search engines are learning to ‘read' like a human. If the content has too many keywords and unlikely sentence structures, it may consider the site to be manipulated and not list it.
If you want a site that attracts search engines AND keeps people on your website, you need to have information that is relevant, informative and well written. However, when using methods that are designed to attract search engines, the content still needs to be keyword-rich. What does that mean?
Keyword-Rich Content
Keywords are very important to search engines. The words you think that people looking for your information or product might use in the search engines are called ‘keywords'. The search engine acts like a Yellow Pages phone book. People look up a topic by word or phrase and find the related entries listed.
Your traffic will depend largely on if you choose the right words. If you use words that no one is searching for - or words that are highly competitive - your chances of being found through the search engines goes down dramatically.
One way to find the right keywords is to find out what words are most popular for searches. Using a word harvester like the Keyword Selector Tool (found at overture.com in the Resource Center) you can find out approximately how many searches have been made for your selected keywords. You may find some similar words or phrases that have even higher amounts of searches than your first selection.
The key to finding the best words for your content is to use the most general term first and then find more specific words or phrases that relate to your website. For example; if you are looking for words for a children's education site, you might first look up the words ‘children' or ‘education' to discover the most searched term related to your topic. Perhaps you'll see ‘child education' or ‘teaching children' are more commonly searched terms than ‘children's education'.
When you've found words or phrases that are commonly searched for you can find details on the competition for these words in the PPC area by using the View Bids Tool, also in the Overture Resource Center. If the word has high bids or many bidders you can consider that the competition will also be high in the natural search engine results. Check it out for yourself. If the natural search is bringing up sites that lack appropriate content you may be able to top them with your own keyword-rich content.
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