Keywords, keywords, keywords

I believe more and more that you cannot start too early to determine keywords related to what your website is about. These words should drive traffic to the sight as a result of searchers using them. Doing keyword analysis before adopting a domain name may be wise. A site like computerrepair.com is rather generic when compared to laptopcomputerrepair.com. Or even more precise may be onsitelaptoprepair.com. If you would like to be more geographically oriented you may consider OClaptoprepair.com. This is a marketing decision because choosing one over the other or being too specific may exclude potential customer groups that you want. The marketing question to resolve: is it too broad or too narrow with respect to our target markets.

The basis of keywords is deciding what words or phrases ordinary humans will insert in the search engine of their choice when they are looking for a particular product or service. This is not what you think they should enter or what GOOGLE or YAHOO thinks they mean, but what they actually do enter. This is why much of keyword determination is research and then trial and error, tweaking, tweaking some more and measuring the results. The research will increase your probability of obtaining the objective but will not take you to 100%. Websites like wortracker.com and keyworddiscovery.com can help in research. You can also enter search terms yourself and see what comes up and if it relates closely to your website.

If paid search advertising is used to drive traffic to your site, a big part of the this approach is about keywords. if you have already studied keywords as related to your website you will be ahead of the game because these words or phrases are purchased from the search engines. Depending on relevancy factors of your site as it relates to the search query, it will appear in one of the ad positions on the search page results. Right words at the right place at the right time will result in a click onto the target website.

Keywords are key. They are also nebulous, can be expensive, can be too broad or too narrow and are probably not the silver bullet many website owners are looking for. They are, however, an intergral part of any internet marketing strategy. Avoid thinking that the search engines are on the side of the website owner. The search engine customer is the searcher and their business model depends on providing the searcher results that are consistently credible, relevant and on point. If they do that the customer continues to return and everything else in their business model falls more easily into place.