Keywords:

The words or phrases that people type into search engines.

So how do you choose keywords for your site?

I used to wait until near the end of website development to worry about keywords for clients, but it’s become apparent to me that the issue of keywords is deeper than coming up with a laundry list of words to stuff in a meta tag, hoping a search engine will find it.

But it’s become apparent to me that keywords are really a way to pull a site into focus by helping you decide what content your site needs.  I now ask about keywords early on in the development process, but not always directly. When I ask directly I get “company-speak” (inside language and terminology that clients and users don’t always use).  Or I’ll get such generic terms that there’s no way to get good search engine placement for them (like “software development”). 

Rather than the direct approach I often like to ask clients and client stakeholders to give me the “elevator pitch” about their company - that brief explaination about what products or services they provide is often fertile with good keywords to focus the site on.  Looking at past advertisements and marketing campaigns is another good source.  You want to look for those core words and phrases that describe your product or service in a way that people use to look for it.

Once you have a list of possible keywords, the next thing to find out is if people actually use them while searching—no sense wasting time and effort optimizing for a term that no one really searches with.

Here’s a tool were you can enter a search term, and it wil tell you how many times that term has been searched for in the past month on Overture.

Your keyword list should now play a central role in the design of your site.  Those words should appear everywhere in the site structure and content—home page copy, page descriptions, page titles, links, and link titles, etc.  Essentialy the more you can use them in a valid, structural way (as opposed to sticking them in a Meta tag 300 times) the more likley that yoru site will rank well for that term.

One word of warning - I often note a bit of tension between some marketing efforts and search engine optimization.  I’ve seen it happen where a marketing/branding firm develops a trademarked product name, and *only* wants to talk about the product using that name, rather than any generic alternatives. 

For example…let’s say you have a suite of software applications that serves the tree trimming market.  Your branding consultants have dubbed this software “Leaf Interconnection Management Bundle”, or “LIMBS” for short.  Wanting to get as much brand penetration as possible, they’re going to want you to always talk about your products specificially using “LIMBS” or “Leaf Interconnection Management Bundle”.  They want to distinguish it from it’s competitors, and rightly so.

The problem is, most people searching for your software have never heard of it.  They’re going to search for more generic keywords like “tree trimming software” or “tree business software”.  If your site doesn’t have those keywords on it, people will never find your “LIMBS” product.

It’s a tough pill for marketing and branding experts to swallow, but web sites must speak the same language that your potential clients speak, or they will never find you in the first place.