Internet search engines, like Google, index websites based on keywords. They trawl through your site and make counts of the number of times a keyword is listed. (However they will black list any site which abuses this by stuffing a website full of keywords. This technique, which you used to see used a lot around 2003-2006 is a bad idea now).
Obviously then, if you want a successful webpage then you need keywords appearing regularly in the text of your website. This all seems simple enough. If you're a farmer you might include the word 'farming' a lot. If you're an accountant you might include 'accountant' a lot.
But wait, should you use 'accountant' 'accounting' 'tax returns' or what? What you need is a tool to tell you what term most people search for.
This little tool is extremely handy, you type in the keyword you are looking for, and it returns how many people searched for that term and variations on that term. It can save you month of guesswork trying to choose the right keywords to promote your site.
In our example, on the day this article was written, searching for variations on accountant returned the following interesting results.
| Term | Number of searches |
|---|---|
| accountant | 253545 |
| accountant tax | 98286 |
| accountant certified public | 7423 |
| accountant chartered | 3517 |
| accounting | 420501 |
| accounting services | 60386 |
| financial accounting | 42750 |
| managerial accounting | 39573 |
| business accounting | 33854 |
| tax help | 165154 |
| tax services | 138250 |
| tax accountant | 98286 |
So what can we learn from this?
Well, more people search for accounting than accountant, with tax help coming in third place. People do like see the word 'certified' attached to the word accountant. Most people who search for 'accounting' are looking for accounting software, only a small proportion of those are looking for services. A larger number look for a tax accountant.
So what keywords should you be focusing on on your website? (Or in Google AdWords, check the relevant article).
Well... that depends largely on the number of competitors you've got for each keyword. There is a lot of competition for the word 'accountant'. There is less for 'accounting services'. If you can get to the top of one of those keywords, a large proportion of those searches will end up at your site. What you need to do is to take each keyword, and type it in to a search engine. See what the highest few ranked pages look like, and decide if you think you can better them. When you've found a keyword which features a high search rate, and low enough competition, you've found a keyword which will bring visitors streaming to your site. And visitors = cash.
The extra beauty of this is that it is expenditure free - the only thing that you are giving is your time. A high placed site on a popular keyword is worth a large outlay on other marketing methods like Google AdWords.
In the next article, I discuss how to place the keywords that you have chosen to get you to the top of the search engines!
