subject: The Importance of Keywords for Your Website [print this page] One of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation in respect of web design is not merely the putting together the code and building links, but in analysing the keywords in the website. The choice of key phrases is particularly important because if these are not appropriately targeted at your business, then a great deal of time and money could be wasted.
Business people who have websites often want to use very broad phraseology that they think will bring visitors to their website and in turn to their business. For example, if you have a website that promotes tennis coaching, the site owner might wish to target the word "tennis" which of course would bring a great many people to their site. However, much of this would not be targeted traffic, as people would be visiting the site who wanted tennis shoes and other tennis equipment. In such cases, people visiting would probably not go further than the home page of the site, go back to the search engine results and then pass on to the next website. In this way, little business would be generated.
In overcoming this problem, it is better and more cost effective to target very specific phrases, such as "tennis lessons", "tennis coaching", "tennis clases", etc. Such phrases will produce much better top listings and produce a more effective result. Whilst there would be less visitors to the website, the traffic would be relevant and therefore more tennis coaching would be sold.
Presently, there is no tool for advising website designers as to exactly how much traffic a specific key phrase might attract. This may well be due to the search engines wishing to maintain pertinent results, as opposed to website owners being able to optimise their websites for key phrases that will produce more web traffic for them.
Nonetheless, there are some tools that are available online that can assist website owners to gauge how much traffic they might receive. The one that most people know about is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It is necessary to open an Adwords account to access this facility, but it is a free account and is simple to set up. Once you have set up your account, you can then input your key phrases and Google will analyse them and suggest other phrases, also guiding you as to how much traffic these other phrases may attract. Many people believe these estimates to be inflated, but at the very least they are a guide.
Another useful tool is Google Trends, as this indicates how much traffic you might expect. This facility allows people to compare the volume of searches that might be achieved between two or more phrases. A further feature is an ability to show news items that are related to the search term that is overlaid on the chart, which demonstrates how news events might affect the search.
Finally, Wordracker uses different sources to follow key phrases and traffic for them and is able to provide people with niche key phrases and traffic estimates.
