One thing that should help with your keyword choice is your competitive edge. Hopefully you offer something unique and this will give you a platform to start choosing terms. If you find you are offering the same product or service as everybody else, you need to define you own angle and that’s where your keyword search begins. If you want to find out what your competition uses you can use the handy tool offered by Submit Express. It’s called “Page Snooper” and all you have to do is type in your rivals URL and Page Snooper provides the page source of that page. Of course you can also do this from your browser by using the menu bar as follows: View>Page Source. Sometimes this is also accessed by using: View>View Source. Page snooper makes the process a little faster because you don’t have to be on the site to see the code. There are a bunch of other free tools as well, like “Free Submission”, “Meta Tags Generator” and “Reciprocal Link Checker”. So get started with some great free tools.

Once you decide on your product or service, the next step is to find keywords that describe it. One of the best tools is the Google Keyword tool. This tool will not only suggest a group of keywords to be used in your page content, it will also tell you how popular your word or phrase is. And there’s more, the tool also lets you know about your the competition for the keyword. Knowing the competition for a keyword can help you decide if you want to include it on your site. Too much competition for your keywords or keyword phrases can make it hard for your site to achieve a top search ranking against other sites that use those keywords. Here is my advice: make sure that you use keywords that describe your competitive edge, especially when designing the site. Try to be as specific as possible. A general keyword like “men’s clothing” has a lot of search popularity but it won’t get you to the top of Google’s first page. If you need help choosing keywords before beginning the site design process, consult a web marketing professional.

Once you have a good group of keywords you are ready to start the building process. Before you begin designing, however, make sure you’re clear about what you want the site to accomplish, for example, selling shoes. With your keywords and goals create an outline and copy headings to use as you begin to rough out the structure. I like to use mind maps and flow charts. With a flow chart of the site you are ready to start creating. Use your keywords in:

1. Page titles –– keep them short and specific to the content of each page.
2. Navigation Titles –– say “contact (your business name)” not “contact us”
3. Meta data including meta tags, meta descriptions, etc.
4. Page content –– make sure your page copy includes important keywords
5. Headers
6. Alt tags –– where possible use keywords in your image descriptions

If you are not designing or coding the site yourself, make sure you discuss these items with your web design team. It is amazing how many web sites for large companies ignore keywords in the site structure and try to rely on their brand name or web advertising to get traffic. For an evaluation of your site structure, email jim@newergy.net. I will send you a free report about your site. And watch for my next post where I talk more about keywords and what to do if you already have a site.