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What keywords do you need to emphasize and include? How do you choose the most relevant keywords that will be used by your target audience? Pose yourself the question: What would my target visitor be looking for and for which queries I would like to lure him/her to my site? Imagine those queries, as many of them as you can think. Apply this to all categories of visitors that you are targeting. Then list those queries and formulate your keywords from those. Let your creativity develop grammar and synonym variants of these keywords. The same would apply to descriptions; however while keywords have to match closely with search strings, descriptions should be drafted to allure the visitor after he has seen your listing. It should tell the visitor that your site is indeed offering him best information or outcome for what he is looking. Select phrases (at least two words), rather than single words, as there would be too many contenders for single word searches. You are much better off focusing on specific search keywords and using longer phrases. Positioning Meta tags and keywords into web pages for better ranking should not be confused with spamming. Whatever you do, avoid spamming and keyword stuffing. Search Engines have mechanisms that can spot spamming and as a result ignore such web pages. The key is to insert just "enough" keywords into the web page so as to make the content relevant. Keywords have to be consistent with the entire content of the web page. In other words, do not insert non - relevant keywords just for the sake of improving page rankings. The location of keywords on your website is vital. You may have placed keywords at only a few locations but if they are inserted at important positions, your search engine ranking may be boosted. The most important position is the Title of the page. Ensure that your keyword is placed in the Title. Another proven strategy is to place keywords towards the beginning of the web page. For instance, inserting keywords in page headlines, other sub-titles, and introductory paragraphs would certainly help rankings. Avoid using images or tables at the beginning of the page. This will only shove keywords down on the web page, and in turn harm your search engine rankings. Amongst other strategies, "stemming" is another important technique for placing keywords. Many webmasters believe that adding more graphics to a web page would make it more attractive. This is a misconception. A web page should be rich with HTML text rather than graphics. This makes the site more relevant as Search Engines can easily scan text. Search engines often look for variants of words from a stem and this is referred to as stemming. Thus 'play' can also lead to a search for 'plays' or 'playing' or 'players'. Similarly singular and plural forms of words and case can lead to different results for some search engines. Some advisers suggest that Capitalization is a better bet in choosing keywords. However, the wiser counsel is that these variants do not make that great a difference and one should prefer lowercase. Most searches are made in lowercase. Moreover, many search engines are not case-sensitive. You may like to know what are the most popular search words and strings, so that you could choose top keywords related to your own site. Some resources that help in this are discussed here. Place your subject term in Overture's free Search Term Suggestion Tool. The result will be a list of all search terms related to the word you inserted that were most popular at Overture. The list is in the order of popularity. Thus you know what most people are looking for. Wordtracker has a fee-based service that lets you do the same based on Meta search engines such as Dogpile and Meta Crawler. Supplement this effort through the Related Searches feature that is seen in many search engines. Sites such as AltaVista, Yahoo, HotBot and others have this feature. Place your subject or one of the target keywords in the search string on these. About Author Mukesh Kumar is Marketing Executive with CPWebHosting, which deals with Managing Reputations. The company is the most significant online community for human resources professionals featuring articles, news, webcasts, events, white papers, discussion forums.
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