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Search Engine Keywords |
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The first step in selecting the keywords for your e-commerce site is to take some educated guesses. Try to find your competitors using just a search engine. Keep good records of what keywords you try and what works best. Note the rank for each keyword for each competitor. Did they come up number one on the search? Or were they buried on page nine? A spreadsheet makes an excellent tool for this early analysis. (What search engine should you use while testing? There are a lot of choices, but as I write these words in mid-2002, all of those choices boil down to Google. It's the most popular search engine, and arguably the most important. You NEED to rank well in Google, so it only makes sense to test in Google. What ever you do, do not conduct your keyword tests in a directory, like Yahoo or ODP, because your results will be badly skewed. We'll talk more about why in Promotion 102, when we discuss The Major Players.)
The only keywords that really matter are the ones that work, but you can also often get an idea of what your competitors "think" are good keywords. Most browsers, like Netscape and Internet Explorer, will let you right-click on your competitor's page and do a "View Source." Look near the top of their source code for something like META NAME="keywords" and then examine the Contents field that immediately follows it. These are the keywords your competitor has chosen to target, and they might give you a few fresh ideas. If nothing else, you can use these Meta Keywords to fuel additional searches. We'll talk about meta tags in more depth in Promotion 102, of course. Once you've built a list of keywords, take it and set it aside. Depending on your industry and your own history within that industry, what you used to find your competitors might be of dubious quality. There's a real good chance you know too much to be a "typical" customer. It's equally true that your competitors may be similarly blinded by their own industry experience. You may be finding their sites only because they targeted the wrong keywords, the keywords on the far end of the curve that only insiders would typically use. If you make the same mistake, the only people who will ever find your e-commerce site will be your competition! Ask your friends, someone outside your industry, to do the same thing you already did. Have them find your competitors using a search engine, while maintaining good records of what works and what doesn't work. They should record not only what keywords were used, but the position and page of the relevant sites found. The more people you enlist, the better will be your initial keywords list.
When you compare your multiple lists (yours and those of your friends), and combine them where applicable, you'll have the nexus of a keyword list. This is NOT your keyword list, though. It belongs to your competitors. It's how your competitors can be found. If you use this list, you'll be on a par with your competition (assuming you use it well). That's cool, but we want a birdie.
Extending your Keyword List - Maybe?Now that you have a starting point using people (yourself and friends), we're going to see if we can use some software tools to extend the list. To see this software in action, so we can better understand what to expect, we'll first look at it using example keywords. Go to AltaVista and do a keyword search for "poetry." When the first page of results are returned, look right below the search box for the Others searched for: blurb. This is an often unrealized and untapped gold mine! When people go to AltaVista and search for a generic keyword like "poetry," they very often don't like the results. Too much forest and not enough trees. So they try another search, a refinement of their previous, in hopes of getting better results. AltaVista tracks those and when it finds a refined search used by a lot of people, it offers that as a suggestion to others. So, we know that people who start out searching for "poetry" will also very often search for "love poetry" and "poetry contests." Can you spell i-n-v-a-l-u-a-b-l-e? We did this first with an example, because AltaVista won't offer suggestions unless your keyword is fairly generic. You should try it with each item in your keyword list, but don't be surprised (or discouraged) if many or even most don't return a suggestion list. That just means you already have nicely targeted keywords. Where you do get a suggestion list from AV, however, you should use those to extend your list.
If you think this kind of research is time-consuming, entering each of your keywords into AltaVista, I almost hate to tell you that you're just getting started. AltaVista isn't the only search engine that includes a suggestion list, and you need to duplicate your efforts on a number of others. Here's a list of some that will help you extend your keyword list - but you should also realize that search engines change almost daily and this list will never be all-inclusive. Every time you use a search engine, check to see if it has been updated to include the Suggestion feature. Then use it! Excite Getting' tired, yet? Highly Competitive KeywordsEarlier, we briefly talked about highly competitive keywords. These are the search terms that are among the most frequently used on the Internet, words like "travel" and "music." Most of the time (but not all, as we'll soon discover), you'll want to avoid targeting these keywords. Competition for these keywords is fierce and going head-to-head with the Big Boys is often a mistake. To avoid them, obviously you need to know what they are. So, before we move farther, I want to offer some resources that will help.
While you'll certainly find differences on each of these "top" lists, you'll also find commonalties. And those, without exception, are the words you'll normally avoid. Except … maybe not?
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© copyright 2002 Ron Carnell All Rights Resevered 7/12/2002 |
