Have you ever heard from someone who attained a top 10 position in a major search engine and the person was elated at how much new traffic flooded into his or her Web site. Sure – you’d expect them to be happy with such an outcome, right? But sometimes you hear from someone else who also achieved a top 10 ranking but they become disappointed when just a handful of visitors show up. How can two people achieve high rankings and have such markedly different outcomes? Simple. The person in the first example selected a keyword or phrase that many people are searching on, and the second did not!

The question to ask yourself is how do you really know if you’re optimizing your pages for keywords that Web surfers are looking for? There are several good techniques you can apply to determine what people might be searching for:

• Put yourself in their shoes and brainstorm.
• See what keywords your competitors are targeting to spur new ideas.
• Organize and focus your keywords into short phrases, etc. However, the best way is to stop guessing and actually SEE what people are searching for. That’s why we’ve integrated the WordTracker keyword research tool into WebPosition.

Here’s the strategy I recommend:

1. Brainstorm on what general words apply to your industry and list them all out in a word processor or on paper.
2. Next, conduct a search for a few of them on a major search engine and then travel to the sites you find in that search.
3. View the HTML source code for the page and write down the keywords used in the Meta tags and any you see on the visible page. You’ll quickly find a variety of keywords you hadn’t considered before. This does not mean these are the best keywords to target, but it can help you in your brainstorming process. IMPORTANT: Make sure you only write down words and phrases that specifically apply to YOUR business! You don’t want to waste time targeting keywords that will not bring you high quality leads.
4. At this stage, most people would start GUESSING what keywords and phrases people are most likely to search on. Don’t guess. Learn the most popular combinations by taking the individual words and researching them with the WordTracker tool built into WebPosition.

If you follow the procedure we’ve just outlined, you’ll soon have a list of dozens, if not hundreds of keyword phrases you could target on all of the search engines. This new keyword generator illustrates what I’ve told MarketPosition readers for years: not everyone is competing for the exact same keywords! There are literally 1000’s of opportunities available for any business. Find YOUR niche, make sure it’s one that people are looking for, then pursue it!

Bonus Tip: Some of the keywords are going to be much more competitive than others. For example, ranking well on the single word “travel” will be much more difficult than ranking in the top 10 for “Caribbean cruises.” Remember that single keywords usually return the least targeted leads. If someone is searching on just plain old “travel” are they:

• Helping their child with a paper on some aspect of “travel”
• Looking for the “travel channel”
• Looking to plan a vacation cruise?
• Day dreaming about time travel?
• Looking for driving directions for their travel across the country?
• Looking for a travel club such as AAA?
• Looking for the perfect backpack or hiking supplies for a travel expedition?

If you own a travel agency that specialized in vacation cruises and optimized your site for the single keyword “travel,” only a limited number of the people identified in the example above would be qualified prospects. You’d find a great number of search engine referrals to your site if you attained a good ranking on the keyword, but many of them would select the “back” button in their browsers, turn around and effectively walk out of your store! That’s not the outcome you’d be looking for. When you target longer keyword phrases there is a much higher likelihood that you have focused in on exactly the right prospects. It’s the difference between attracting actual buyers versus tire kickers.

The best thing to do is to target multi-word keyword phrases that give you the highest quality leads. For example, we sell software, but we don’t waste our efforts trying to rank #1 on the word software. That’s just too general, not to mention too competitive.

Ideally, you will want to target keyword phrases that are queried with some frequency, that are specific to your Website, but less competitive. How can you tell if a keyword/phrase is highly competitive? WordTracker will calculate a parameter called the Keyword Effective Index (KEI). This parameter takes into account both how popular and how competitive a keyword is on the search engines.

The easiest road to success is to target popular keywords that your competitors have overlooked. You can click on the “Actual Results” link on the WebPosition Detail Report and view the total quantity of matching Web sites reported for that keyword phrase. If you are considering two phrases, each one appears to be queried with roughly the same frequency, but one returns 10,000 matches and another that returns 100,000 matches, which one should you target first? The one with the fewer matches of course! That’s because you’ll be competing against fewer Web sites for the top spots!

Also, just because a phrase returns 10,000 matches does NOT mean you have only a 1 in 10,000 chance of ranking number one. If you simply submitted your page and did nothing else, then yes, your odds of ranking near the top are low. Discovering the “magic” quantity of keywords and tags to rank in the top 10 is also next to impossible to do by hand. That’s why we created WebPosition. To simplify search engine positioning and to give you a competitive advantage.

When you use WebPosition’s “Page Critic” feature to analyze the keyword concentrations on your Web pages, you have GREATLY improved your odds of success! In fact, we are so confident that WebPosition Gold will work for you – for your Web site – on your search phrases, that we GUARANTEE your success in the first 30 days or we’ll refund 100% of your money.

I know that the majority of Web site owners are targeting the WRONG keywords. How did I reach this conclusion? Easy. A recent study showed that only 34% of Web site owners knew enough to include a simple keyword meta tag on their Web page! Therefore, just by adding a keyword meta tag AND properly optimizing the rest of the page for your keywords, you’ll be doing far more than the 66% of Web site owners have ever done! If you take the time to target the RIGHT keywords, I’m guessing you’ll be ahead of 99% of the world and you’ll be generating more traffic with less effort. Work smarter, not harder is what I always say!

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