The Company Website Crash Course

How To Choose Keywords

Targeting keywords increases traffic and qualifies visitors. Keywords and search terms are those words or phrases that your customers may enter on a search engine in order to find a Website that offers products or services like yours. Choosing keywords is not difficult if you follow a few guidelines.

Basic rules for choosing keywords

1. Think Like Your User
Try to think like your customers, and choose words or phrases that you could imagine them entering into a search engine. How would you find a site like yours? If you can find your competitors via a search engine, what search terms did you use to locate them?

2. Be Specific
Be specific. If you sell cars, for example, it will be almost useless to choose 'cars' as a keyword, as you compete with too many other sites. 'Affordable second hand cars' would be a much better choice.

3. Use Words From the Page
Use words that appear in your page's content. Let's say your site sells second hand cars and you have different sections for Fords and Toyotas. An effective choice of keywords might work like this:

• Front page: 'second hand cars', 'used cars', 'affordable cars'
• Ford page: 'second hand fords' 'used fords' 'previously owned fords'
• Toyota page: 'second hand toyotas' 'used toyotas' etc etc.

And make sure you use these keywords in your page titles.

How to Write Page Descriptions

Good page descriptions can make a big difference to your site's traffic. Some search engines such as msn use a page's description as the text that appears beneath the title in a list of search results. This provides Websites with an excellent opportunity to create the right impression pre-click.

Combined with a good page title, you can use your description to further qualify your visitors. Here are a few rules of thumb:

• Page descriptions should be a maximum of two sentences long and be as concise as possible.
• Be as honest as you can. It's far better to attract visitors that really are looking for a company like yours than to mislead people.
• If possible, write descriptions that also contain the keywords or phrases you're targeting.
• Do not use overly promotional language -- people don't like it and some search directories may refuse to include pages that do this.
• Don't use all capital letters or multiple exclamation marks. People will think you're insane.

A practicle example: Let's say you sell second hand cars and that you've already chosen a title. Here are some examples of what to do and what not to do:

Bad example:

Good example:

I won't bother explaining why the first example is so dreadful -- if you can't see why yourself, then there's probably no hope for you!

What makes the second example so good is this:

The first sentence tells the reader exactly what you do, while at the same time making sure that the site doesn't lose potential customers due to the business's location: they can deliver for free.

The second sentence tells the reader what kind of site to expect when they click the link. The whole description is accurate, informative and appealing, without being overly promotional.

Conclusion

When you're writing page descriptions, try to think like a user that's looking through a list of search results. What would make you choose one link rather than another? Try to keep your descriptions short, to the point and honest: a user who's tricked into visiting your site will not buy from you.

Further Information

For more information on the topics outlined in this article, try:

• Information architecture tutorial
• The Art of Information Architecture
• The Navigation and Usability Guide
• Designing Web Usability
• Writing for the Web
• Successful Keyword Targeting
• How To Use HTML Meta Tags
• Search Engine Optimization Free!