SEO, Targeting the Right Keywords

Choose the right keywords. This is an extremely important part of SEO and should be done FIRST. Optimizing a site takes a lot of time, patience, and hard work. Doing this targeting the wrong keywords can be devistating. Find relevant keywords that are searched for often. Make sure you target "phrases" rather than single keywords. For example, targeting "hosting" alone will not help you. There are too many search results. But targeting "web hosting provider", "web hosting service", and "hosting business" will get you more realistic results (and a ton of traffic). Plus you are still targeting "hosting". I would suggest targeting ONE "reach phrase" and TWO "realistic phrases". Three phrases may seem like a lot, but not when one or two keyterms is in all three phrases. When this occurs, things don't get watered down, giving better results.

Let's begin with the "bare bones" of website optimization. Title tag and meta tags. Most SE's (search engines) give little to no relevance to some of these, however, since no one really knows how they are factored by each engine, they are still important steps in optimizing any web site.

The TITLE tag

Here is an example Title tag which should appear in-between the HEAD tags of your web page(s):

The title tag is very important. Why? Because SE's not only give it value in relation to search engine optimization, but they use it in their search results. Search on ANY search engine, and you'll see the content of this tag used in the anchor text of the links for each web site. Here is a little experiment. Follow the Google link (opens in a new window) and take a look. Google Experiment

There are 28,100,000+ pages in Google with the title tag. So most of the web page links displayed are Untitled Document. Why? Because who ever built these web pages used an editing program that adds the title tag, and they never changed the title text which is certainly poor SEO.

So what should be in the title tag? The name of your business or web site with the "keyword phrase" you are targeting. For example, your business sells "watches". This is a broad search term and using it alone my not work out for you. There are 42,500,000 estimated search results in Google. However searching for the term "Swiss watches" I get 2,760,000 estimated results. The likelihood of your site appearing in the first 3 pages of Google is much more realistic using "Swiss watches". This is better website optimization. Plus, the keyword "watches" is still present, so you are actually targeting both terms.