STEP 4: KEYWORDS AND KEYWORD PHRASES

By now all of you have reams of paper full of your competitors and your complimentary services. In this step we will use our key word lists that we built in the introduction to create our keywords for:

• organic search
• engine optimization
• Pay Per Click Management
• Section 508 HTML attributes
• site design elements
• themed keyword saturation throughout the site
• link popularity integration
• submission order and sequence
• site navigation elements and site architecture
• web analytics and consumer business profiling
• text media buy advertising.

When all of these elements aren’t in sync, your search engine placement suffers. And not getting the search engine placement you expected naturally causes an undesirable ROI.

So many sites fail to achieve their marketing objectives quite simply because they are targeting the wrong keywords. It's essential to understand the way that surfers search themselves.

Using a single keyword can bring back millions of pages in a search. To qualify their selection they tend to use more than one word for a search, or even a natural language question.

Remember: you can only optimize a website for maybe ten words and phrases - not hundreds - so you should choose very, very carefully. But the most important thing is choosing the right words and phrases to optimize for.

Tip: If you don't use a pay per click strategy to determine which words and phrases actually attract paying customers first, you will spend weeks and almost always choose the wrong keywords. The words you initially think you want are almost always different than the ones that actually work - believe me; I've made that mistake many times.

Organic Search Engine optimization takes 30 days to several months to see the results so when you're playing the search engine optimization game, you CANNOT afford to target the wrong keywords.

When you do pay per click campaigns properly, you'll see that there are almost always a few really productive words and phrases that only 2-3 people are bidding on, instead of 10 or 20 bidders. What that means is that those people are not optimizing their websites for those same keywords either.

Just like pay per click, search engine phrases have varying degrees of competitiveness If you want a #1 ranking for a "generic product group" it's going to be a lot harder than getting a #1 ranking for "specific brand”.

When you do search engine optimization, you must pick battles you can win.

Use a pay per click campaign to quickly determine which keywords are productive, THEN do your site optimization based on what really works.