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Keyword Marketing

By Amrit Hallan

Keyword marketing is one of the most important aspects of your overall online promotion efforts, and if your business primarily depends on search results on different search engines, then the manner in which you conduct your keyword marketing can make or break your business. It basically means ranking high on the search engines for the chosen keywords and key phrases.

The search engine traffic is nothing but the game of keywords and key phrases. The user searches for a keyword and millions of websites come up as a result, and among them, a few of them manage to appear on the first page of the search result. Some have mastered the art of being there, some have stumbled there accidentally, and some have appeared by mistake. You see, some webmasters end up concentrating on all the keywords in the world but the ones that they actually need. If the search engine traffic matters to you, you should formulate your search engine marketing strategy diligently and with great caution.

First of all, research what all keywords your real visitors use to find services and products similar to what you are selling. Rather than thinking what SHOULD be the keywords, you should focus upon what keywords ARE being used and focus your keyword marketing efforts towards those keywords. For instance, if you are marketing a type of styluses, don't assume that most people are familiar with the term: they might be searching for "electric pens".

So conduct a brainstorming sessions and draw a list of all the keywords that are relevant to your business. Talk to various persons without telling them the purpose and make them look for your sort of business on the Internet. Highlight the keywords that most persons use. Keep re-arranging them so that the more study you conduct, the more important keywords appear at the top. Once you have a list of 4-5 most important keywords, start your keyword marketing campaign with those keywords at the helm.

What all steps can you take to promote them vis-à-vis your website? Let's go through some steps one by one.

Writing optimized pages

There should be lots and lots of pages on your website that talk about your important keywords. Now, since the search engine crawlers these days can very easily perceive a spamming effort, nonsensical text containing your keywords can very soon get you banned from reputed search engines. The text should not only repetitively use your relevant keywords, it should also make sense.

The search engines assume that if you have lots of pages wrapped around a particular keyword or a phrase then you must know a lot about this thing and hence you should be presented to the searcher above the other websites. So get lots of optimized content for your website and you've made great strides towards successful keyword marketing.

Participating in pay-per-click programs

Sometimes it's not just possible to optimize your website for all the important keywords. So for the remaining keywords, pay per click (PPC) programs such as Googles AdWords are a better way to go. To reduce your click through cost, you can select for your PPC the keywords that do not have to compete hard to get a good placement. Focus creating a copy -- without misguiding as it is going to cost you a lot in terms of real cost and false clicks -- that is compelling, gives the clear message and attracts all the right clicks. Remember that the more clicks your AdWords copy can generate, the less you have to pay per click.

Maintaining a blog

Routinely publish a blog so that your keywords and key phrases appear on it again and again. The searche engines love blogs because their content keeps on changing and they have lots of relevant information. A blog gives you a chance to legitimately use your keywords on a daily basis. Try to use your relevant keywords twice or thrice in every post and soon you have repeated your keyword hundreds of times without getting the blame of orchestrating keyword-spamming.

Defining meta tags

The meta tags in the HTML source of your web pages don't matter to the search engines much these days but somewhere they do appear in the overall ranking calculations. So make sure your meta tags such as the "Keywords" tag and the "Description" contain the right keywords.

Keywords are not the only way to success, especially now when the search engines are developing contextual search algorithms where they'll evaluate your websites according to what is being said rather than what appears there. So focus on your chore objective -- creating and maintaining a fully informative website -- and you've won 60% of the keyword marketing battle.

Copyright © 2008 Amrit Hallan
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