Keywords are essential within meta tags and within the content of your web pages. How do you know which ones will work best to help bring up your rankings in search engines?

First of all, keywords can also include keyphrases as well, so don't feel limited to one word at a time.

To begin, start with a list of words and two- or three-word phrases pertinent to your business type. For example, if you are a Native drum maker who sells your drums on your website, you may feel that your keywords would include drum and beater, but what more could there be?

Well, you've made your own list from the website owner's perspective. Now pretend you are your own customer. You're sitting at your computer and you Google for "drums". Up comes the Pearl and Tama websites, and other online sites for cymbals, snare drums, drum sticks, and classified ads.

Well, that's not quite what you're looking for, so you type "Native drums" or "ceremonial drums". Ah, there... closer. Now, if you were someone who was looking to learn to make your own drum in a workshop, or wanted a specific kind of skin, or needed to know about the frame of a hoop drum, or want to know of drum makers in a specific location, what would you type into the search engine?

Now all of a sudden you've expanded your list to include drum making workshop, ceremonial drum, ceremony (don't forget different spellings and tenses of words), skin, hide, elk, deer, frame, hoop drum, and the name of your location.

You get the idea. Think like your customer to come up with your ideal keywords.

There are some really unique tools on the internet that will help you with your keywords when you get really stumped.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
 
http://www.google.com/sktool/
 
Enter your website address and it will show your web page how a search engine sees it, complete with a list of keyword density and comments on how you can improve this page.
http://spider.searchwho.com/
 
Try this handy tool if you want to know what your ranking is for any search term in Google.
http://googlerankings.com/
 
http://wholinkstome.com/

Same as Google Rankings. Just enter your webpage and search term and see where your website is at!

Keywords aren't really a mystery - it's all about using common sense and thinking like your customer.

© 2005 Renée Deakin. All rights reserved. Copying of this article in any form by any means, mechanical or electric, is strictly prohibited without express permission from Earth Spirit Creations. You may link back to this webpage, as long as full credit is given to author. Contact us for more information.

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