Finding the Right Keywords

Keywords are the key to getting people to your site whether it be via PPC advertising or SEO. You cannot get away from that. Links only give the keywords you happen to be using more weight.

I used to use the shotgun approach. Build huge sites. Use all the keywords I could. Go for quantity and not quality. My logic was that search engines were still rough, so I didn’t need to be accurate.

Then I got a job as a webmaster for an ecommerce site. Products are products. There was no throwing a mass of keywords around without making the site look less than professional. I had to change my methods.

Looking at stats I could see what people were looking for and which keywords were used more for specific products. But I didn’t stop there. I tried to see the logic behind why one phrase was used more often than another. This would give me insight into other phrases when I didn’t have stats. I learned to slowly mold the site based on keywords we were getting. Minor changes in product and category descriptions became drastic changes in traffic and sales down the road. This changed my point of view on keywords.

I see keyword software as tools for brainstorming. I used to dump as many keywords into an Adwords campaign as I could. But what I eventually ran into was that my ROI went to crap. This was before Clickbank had tracking, but I still think it is worthless to throw a whole bunch of keywords at a campaign. I let the patterns of people’s search phrases suggest other patterns. I have learned to be picky with keywords. Quality over quantity.

I thought I was going to cover a lot with this article, but there is too much here for one article. Trying to fit everything in here would not do anyone any good. But look for more articles on keywords, each covering a different aspect.

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