Key words

[s brown]

Hi there on my website i have put 20 differnt key words in there, hoqw many would you recommend putting in as i keep changing them everyday and it is effecting my sales so need to no.

Also i changed my keywords to things like fancy dress uk, cheap fancy, plus size fancy dress uk , however i dont ude those words on my site so should i change them? and are they pointless.


Id i have keywords as lingerie, fancy dress im going to get no where on googe am i?

[Trainer Bubble]

If you are talking about keywords in your meta tags then they now have little effect and your are better of focusing on your headings, titles and the content of your site. Changing them everyday is counterproductive too as Google will want to see some consistency.

An seo bod will surely be here to give more advice soon...

[Original]

Each website page should have different keywords, depending on the content. Tailor your keywords accordingly, so have a page that is "Batman fancy dress" for example. Not only is it more targeted and applies more to the content, but it is preferred by Google, is less common and will rank you higher!

[Rags]

If you focus first on the keywords that have the highest number of searches, you will get the most traffic. So that's a good place to start.

Also focus on the 'buying keywords' - ones that actually lead to sales.

Use Googles own KW tool as a great free source of KW's.

Test and track, test and track, test and track.......stop guessing!

[dfdsolar]

And also you'd better use the CSS+DIV to design your web,and it is benefit for your site if you can use less pictures and FLASH.

[itrends]

Hi,

(new to the forums, but not to SEO) ;)

Head over to
adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Run some searches for terms that target customers / users might use to find your website.

Organise the results by most popular first. Also keep in mind the "competition" level as this often indicates where the 'money' terms are as advertisers are bidding on those phrases.

You then want to think about how your site is laid out. Ideally, if you have a few products / services you would have an individual section for each.

You want to then associate key 'phrases' with each of those sections.

The keyword tag is not really used these days, but the description and title are so those are the two to look at closely.

For example:

I have a site of widgets.com/blue-widget.html
I might put a title tag of "Blue Widgets Online - Buy your blue widgets from widgets.com"
A description of "Blue widgets available. All sizes of blue widgets for sale online in our blue widget store".

The point is that rather than trying to include lots of keywords that would "dilute" the subject matter of the page, you want to choose 3 or so key 'phrases' that include the terms you are aiming for so that the page is highly targetted towards those.

You would then look to match up the content of the page / section to use those similar phrases where applicable. Even simple changes like making "buying our widgets is simple" to "buying our blue widgets online is simple". It wont upset the user, but it lets the search engines understand what you are trying to do with the page and the content.

Search engines are far along from just keywords these days. They take into account the 'theme' of the page, the site, the sites linked to and the sites link from. They can also semantically understand other words and phrases that mean the same or similar things. For example, they would understand that "childrens books" and "childrens reading materials" are of the same 'theme' and thus relevant to the content in use.

So in short
- think about 'phrases' rather than 'words'
- Research the popular terms that have converting traffic (there are other tools out there such as webceo and wordtracker)
- focus on optimising pages / sections for phrases rather than an entire site for lots of phrases / a single phrase
- Remember that you are trying to bring a user in to the best place on your site they could be for the item they are searching for. This helps with conversions too as it means they don't have to 'dig' for the information once they arrive.
- make sure you test, alter and refine. Sometimes something as simple as putting a singular at the front instead of a plural can make those extra few positions difference.


I hope that helps. I tried to make my first post here be something useful rather than just a hello.... as such I hope it helps you and / or others as a result :)

Cheers,
Sunny

[AndyBlack]

Once you research your keywords, put them on your page within 'good' content, and titles, H1 tags etc and then LEAVE them alone. Give the search engines time to crawl, eveluate and index your page. You can always tweak them later if certain ones are not returning any traffic.

Andy

[itrends]

Oh, and just as something a bit more specific in your case....

if you do fancy dress costumes, use that Google tool to search for "fancy dress costume" and see what costumes people are looking for.

Then, if you stock them, go and optimise those pages for that costume. E.g. if you have a kermit the frog one you could use a title of "Kermit The Frog fancy dress cosume - fancycostumes.com" and then adjust description and content accordingly.

If you dont sell the costumes people are looking for, perhaps it might be worth getting hold of one or two from ebay / your dealer and then see how they sell / how well you can optimise for them.

If you want quick sales, PPC / ebay may be the way to go in the short term as the organic results will take a little longer to become fruitful. It also lets you start building up a customer base to get testimonials from, repeat business, and a set of data for email marketing. Your niche lends itself perfectly to email maketing as you could let them know about halloween costumes, xmas costumes etc etc.

Laters.

[itrends]

Once you research your keywords, put them on your page within 'good' content, and titles, H1 tags etc and then LEAVE them alone. Give the search engines time to crawl, eveluate and index your page. You can always tweak them later if certain ones are not returning any traffic.

Andy

Yup. Agreed. Although the engines are quicker at picking things up these days, the relevancy takes longer to establish. Give it a couple of weeks at least when first starting out, and don't worry too much about 'daily' changes of a few places... things move all the time, even hourly now. :) Take an average and watch your stats.

Also, if you don't currently have Google Analytics installed, do that now :)