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| keyword selection |
Many webmasters overuse certain keywords on their site (socalled keyword stuffing) and underuse related keywords. Human readers find such pages irritating and Google’s spam filters look for these unnatural patterns and penalize them! Instead, it is much better to make liberal use of synonyms and other words related to your main terms. This process (often involving a thesaurus) is what information professionals call ontological analysis.
The best way to avoid these and other common mistakes is to follow the following maxims:
G Think like your customer and use their language, not yours.
G Put aside your preconceptions of what you wanted to rank for.
G Put aside subjectivity and focus on the facts.
G Consider popularity, competitiveness, and ontology.
In short, you need to make a scientific study of the keywords and keyphrases your customers and competitors actually use, and balance this against what your competitors are doing. I use a three-step approach to keyword analysis (known affectionately as D–A–D): discovery, attractiveness, and deployment.
Keyword discovery, the first step, is the process of finding all the keywords and keyphrases that are most relevant to your website and business proposition.
The best way to avoid these and other common mistakes is to follow the following maxims:
G Think like your customer and use their language, not yours.
G Put aside your preconceptions of what you wanted to rank for.
G Put aside subjectivity and focus on the facts.
G Consider popularity, competitiveness, and ontology.
In short, you need to make a scientific study of the keywords and keyphrases your customers and competitors actually use, and balance this against what your competitors are doing. I use a three-step approach to keyword analysis (known affectionately as D–A–D): discovery, attractiveness, and deployment.
Keyword discovery, the first step, is the process of finding all the keywords and keyphrases that are most relevant to your website and business proposition.
