Internet Marketing Keyword Selection

Keywords should define a product when used in search engine optimisation. Therefore it is inadvisible to use generic keywords usch as "cheap" or "free" in your search engine optimisation campaign. Keywords are usually two or five word phrases which people are likely to use to serach for your website. In choosing keywords you should also consider the type of problems that your product solves, and those will make good candidates.

A longer search phrase is also more targeted than single keyword search queries. The more targeted the visitors to your ecommerce website are, then the more likely it is that they will buy something from your online shop site.

Keyword density is not too important. Many search engine optimisation specialists focus so much on keyword density that they end up making their content pages look like spam. More important are the areas that they keyword appears (such as top of page) and the amound of text that exists between each occurrence of each keyword, plus how they relate to the the theme of the page and the pages that link to it.

It is also a good idea to look at the keywords used in competitor websites. Google Suggest offers a related keyword tool that can be used to find new keywords not otherwise considered for the primary keywords of your website. Keywords should bring targetted traffic to your website. Each page of your website should contain one or two primary keywords followed by one or two secondary keywords. You cannot optimise for more than this number of keywords otherwise the page will start to look like spam. It can sometimes help to use common mis-spellings of the keyword in the keywords meta tag of the page.

Some of the less sophisticated search engines will display different results for plural and singular versions of keywords. Therefore it can be helpful to optimise your keywords for both singular and plural forms of your keywords if they are both likely to be used by customers. However, most search engines are not case sensitive. Therefore you do not need to optimise of words that begin with uppercase and lower case.

If your keyword uses a hyphen, it is important to note that search engines will treat hyphens as a space. Therefore "ecommerce websites" will be interpreted differently form "e-commerce websites".

The important thing to remember is that your words must be able to both describe the product that the webpage is trying to sell and to be something that is frequenty searched for.

Digital Point has a free keywords suggestion tool located at "www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion" which is an alternative to Yahoo's overture keywords tool.