Here’s a little secret: If you start off by choosing the right topic, you are on your way to creating a winner. Let’s find out how to choose the topic and how to research on it.

1. Choose topic

Write on a subject in which you have a great deal of knowledge. It should also interest your target audience and be related to the product you are trying to sell.

For example, if you sell dog food with vitamin A, you can write an ecourse explaining why vitamin A is important for dogs. This subject will be of interest to dog owners and will also promote your product.

People like information on solving problems they face in their daily lives. Your course can identify a problem, discuss possible solutions and then show how the proposed solution can be implemented by using your products or services.

Examples of problem solving content
You sell handmade soaps for sensitive skin. In your ecourse, you can start off by discussing the problems that people with sensitive skin face, and then talk about ingredients which are good for sensitive skin. Then you can talk about how these ingredients have been used in your soaps.

If your products are decorative (candles, jewelry etc.) and don’t solve any problems, you can create ecourses on explaining how these products are made.

The list of such examples can be endless. The key is to know what information will interest your customers and relate to your product. People generally look for information about:

How to create something
How to make money
How to save time
Self-improvement
How to lead better lives
How to improve relations

2. Research

After choosing the topic you would like to write on, try to research on it. The research can be for two types of information:

The views of your target audience on the subject
The best way to ensure that your ecourse is of interest to your customers is to pay attention to their views on the subject before your start writing on it. You can find their views in the following ways:

1. Communicate with your customers. Ask them questions and listen to what they have to say about your product and your chosen subject.
2. Conduct an online survey or ask your website visitors for comments.
3. Read messages on message boards, chat rooms and discussion lists.

Current information available on the subject
Conducting a research about related information will give you an idea of what has already been written on the subject. It will also give you information you may not already be aware of. You will become more knowledgeable and your ecourse will become more informative. You will be able to write on the subject with more authority.

This research can be conducted through the following:
Search Engines
Ezines
Portals
Article announcement lists
Ebooks
Books

Now that you have chosen your subject and researched on it you are ready to create an ecourse. Become an Ecourse Master by Subscribing to Ecourse Intro – A FREE 7 day course on Writing, Creating and Promoting Ecourses. Visit Ecourse Wizard to subscribe.

Professional Web Site

Both content and design play a huge part on the overall appearance and impression of the web site. While designing your web site, it is important to pay attention to layout, navigation and usability issues. Design your website according to the purpose or goals you have in mind for it.

Suggestion: More on your web site’s purpose here.
More on planning for web design here.

Useful and Informative Web Content

It is important to provide informative and useful content in your website to enhance its credibility. This will also get you more exposure from the search engines. Also, try to sound clear and sincere in your web content and avoid errors by re-checking and proof reading.

Suggestion: Create an article section in your website and upload articles related to the theme of your website.

Credible Promotional Content

Intrusive advertisements like pop ups, animated banners and flash movies should generally be avoided. It is recommended that you promote your products/services while sounding informative.

Suggestion: Talk about what you can deliver and stress on real benefits versus empty promises.

Highlight your expertise

Are you affiliated with a respected organization or have certifications related to your profession? If so, clearly state this in the content of your web site.

Suggestion: Display the button of the affiliation throughout the website and mention it in the content of about us and/or home page.

Include customer references

If you are a product based business it will be a good idea to include testimonials of customers who have bought your products. If you are a service based business you can include a portfolio page or case studies about your customers. Knowing that you have an existing customer base will make it easier for your web site visitors to trust you.

Suggestion: Create a “testimonials” or “case studies” page linking to your service page or main menu.

Give contact/profile information

Make your contact information easily available. If possible, give details about your staff/ management team along with their photographs. People like knowing who they are doing business with.

Suggestion: Your website should have separate pages for about us and contact information linked through the main menu.

Consistently update your web site content

Updating and reviewing your web site content often will ensure that it does not include outdated, inaccurate and erroneous information. All of these can have a negative impact on the credibility of your web site.

Suggestion: Blogging software has made updating content very easy. Take a look at Word Press.

Google is already considered to be the biggest and most favorite search engine owing to the quality of results it provides. Now its importance has increased more than ever. A high ranking in Google can really take you places. You will be in the top search results of Yahoo as well as Google. What more can a webmaster ask for?

How does one go about getting a high ranking in Google? That is a million dollar question. Do you need to understand the nitty gritty of the ranking algorithm and the Page rank technology? You can try it, if you like techie stuff. However, it is not necessary to get you a good ranking. You just need to follow a few simple rules:

1. Focus

Focus your website on one theme. Ideally, your website should be discussing one type of information (how to write and promote ebooks), or selling one type of product or service, or speaking to one target audience. To achieve this focus, it is important to have a clear sense of the direction you want your website to take, and the audience which is being targeted by your website. A website consultant can help you with this task.

More on planning your website here:
Planning the Design of your Website

2. Smartly Selected Keywords

The quality and relevance of your website traffic would largely depend on the keywords or key phrases you are targeting. Therefore, it is important to target the right keywords. Your keywords should be related to the theme of your website. They should also be descriptive. In other words use common nouns (price guide for historical coins) instead of proper nouns (Dave’s Heritage Coin Books).

More on selecting the right keywords here :
The Seven Secrets of Keyword Selection

3. Treating Links as Content

We know that link popularity is also important to get high rankings in Google. Links to external websites are also considered useful content, and a section of your website can be dedicated to these links.

There are two things to remember when you create internal or external links in your website:

4. Well Written Web Page Content

Even if you have selected the right keywords, you might not get high rankings for them. To achieve high rankings it is important to insert keywords smartly in your web content. You need the right keyword placement as well as high keyword density in your web content for a good ranking.

Fussing only over meta tags would not get you anywhere, as Google does not index most meta tags. Therefore, it is very important for your website to have well written content. This would not only make sure that you rank high in Google, but would also ensure that you grab the attention of your website visitors and are able to sell to them.

More on well written web content:
Dos and Don’ts of Web Content Writing

These are some of the major considerations that you need to keep in mind when creating your web page content. Not only will this result in higher rankings for your website, it will also create a wonderful browsing experience for your website user.

1. Benefits

Do start with the most compelling benefits of your website and turn it into a bold headline. Don’t start with a useless welcome slogan.

2. Empathy

Do focus on the needs of your website visitors and prospects.
Don’t talk about your problems first.

3. Consistency

Do follow a consistent formatting style for your web page.
Don’t make it look like a multicoloured illustration with 10 fonts and 20 colours.

4. Simplicity

Do make your web content sound simple. D
on’t use difficult and confusing words. The visitors should get your message immediately. They are not going to make too much effort to understand if you are being too academic. They will simply click away and you may lose a potential sale.

5. Scannability

Do make your web content scannable by including lots of headings and bullets. The visitors should know immediately what you are trying to tell them.
Don’t put big blocks of text on your web pages, which are impossible to read, and very boring.

6.Concise

Do try to be as brief and as concise as possible when writing content for your website.
Don’t go on and on about a subject providing irrelevant details which do not interest your visitors.

7. Interesting

Do write in a friendly and interesting manner.
Don’t sound boring and impersonal. Your visitors should enjoy reading your web content and get hooked to it.

8. Error free

Do ensure that your web content is free of spelling and grammatical errors and is punctuated correctly.
Don’t write the web content in a hurry and upload it without proof reading. If you have mistakes in your web content it would make you look unprofessional.

What is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the types of sites which are linking to you. A link from a site which is related to yours is more valuable than a link from an unrelated site.

In this article, I explore different methods by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. I start with the methods that you shouldn’t bother using, then go on to the moderately effective methods, and then end with the most effective methods you can use to boost the link popularity of your site.

1) Submitting your site to Free For All (FFA) pages

A common misconception among many Internet marketers is that while FFA pages may not directly bring in traffic to your site, it will help to improve the link popularity of your site, and hence, will indirectly bring in traffic through the search engines.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most FFA pages can contain only a certain number of links at a time. This means that when you submit your site to a FFA page, your site will be placed at the top of the page. However, as more and more people submit their sites to the FFA page, your site will be pushed down, and finally, when it reaches the bottom of the page, it will be removed.

Now, since you can bet that plenty of other people are also submitting their sites to the FFA pages, your site will remain in these pages for only a short span of time. Hence, in order to ensure that the search engines see your site if and when they come to spider the FFA page, you will need to ensure that you submit your site to these FFA pages on a regular basis – at least once a week.

Even if you used an automatic submission program to do it, can you imagine a worse way to spend your time and/or money? Furthermore, many search engines recognize these pages which only contains links to other sites as FFA pages and may completely ignore them. And while I haven’t yet seen any evidence that submitting to the FFA pages will actually penalize your site, there is every possibility that this might happen in the future.

Hence, when it comes to FFA pages, my advice is simple: don’t even think about them.

2) Joining Reciprocal Link Services

Some people have recommended that in order to increase the link popularity of your site, you can join some reciprocal link services. The basic idea behind these services is that you add some pages to your site which contain links to other sites which are members of that service, and in exchange, these members will also add pages to their sites which will contain a link to your site. Theoretically, more the members of that service, more your link popularity.

However, I have plenty of reservations about using this method to boost the link popularity of your site:

Hence, I don’t recommend that you join any reciprocal link programs.

3) Exchanging links with other webmasters

Another way of improving the link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other webmasters who have sites which are related to yours, but are not direct competitors. Here’s how you can do it:

First, open a database program like Microsoft Access and create a new table containing fields like FirstName, LastName, Email Address, URL etc. Then, make a list of the sites belonging to your competitors. Then, go to AltaVista, and type in the following in the search box:

link:somesite.com -url:somesite.com

where somesite.com is the domain name of one of your competitors. This will give you a list of all the sites which are linking to that competitor. Then, find out in what context a particular site has linked to your competitor. If this site is an affiliate of your competitor, then your chance of getting a link from this site is limited, unless you offer an even better affiliate program. However, if you find that this site has a Links page which contains links to other sites, one of which is a link to your competitor, then it is an excellent prospect for exchanging links. Find out the name and email address of the webmaster of the site and add them to your database. In this way, go through all the sites which are linking to your competitors, locate those sites which you think may want to exchange links with you, and build up your database.

Once you have done that, create a Links page in your site, and add the URLs of these sites to the Links page. Then, send an email to these webmasters, introduce yourself and your site, congratulate them on building an excellent web site, tell them that you have already added a link to their sites from yours, and then ask them whether they would be kind enough to add a link to your site. In your email, emphasize the fact that exchanging links in this way will be mutually beneficial for both of you because it will help both of you drive traffic to your sites. Wait for a month or so to see the response. Some webmasters will agree to link to you. Others will simply not respond. After a month, remove the links to those sites who are not interested in exchanging links and using the methods outlined above, try to locate more sites with which to exchange links.

When you send the email to the webmasters, make sure that you personalize each email. Don’t begin every email with “Hello Webmaster”, begin with “Hello Mike”. If you want, you can use email merge programs to automatically personalize each email. You can check out some email merge programs by going to http://download.cnet.com and searching for “email merge” (without the quotes).

The main problem with this method of improving the link popularity of your site is that it takes a lot of time. You may find that the number of links you manage to get just does not justify the time that you spend over it. However, I have been evaluating a program named Zeus which automates this process of exchanging links to a large extent. You can download a free trial version of Zeus from here

Another thing that you can do is to mention in your Links page that you are willing to exchange links with other web sites. This allows other webmasters who come to your web site to propose a link exchange.

4) Starting an Awards Program

A moderately effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is to start an awards program. You can have web sites which are related to yours apply for an award from your site. The sites which win the award get the chance to display the logo for your award. This logo is linked to your site, preferably to a page which contains more information on the award.

If you publish a newsletter, consider declaring the winners in your newsletter. You can also perform a review of the winners’ sites in your newsletter. This adds useful content to your newsletter and also gives more webmasters the incentive to apply for your award, since you may review their sites in your newsletter. This also gives them the incentive to subscribe to your newsletter to see if they win the award.

Make sure that you give awards to only those sites which deserve to win. If you give your award to sites which don’t deserve it, your award will have little credibility, which will, in turn, hurt the credibility of your company. Furthermore, make sure that the logo you design for the award looks professional. If it doesn’t, not many webmasters will want to display it in their sites.

5) Giving testimonials

This may sound a bit unusual, but giving testimonials for products or services which you find useful can be another moderately effective way of improving the link popularity of your site. If you really like a product, simply write to the company and tell them why you liked the product so much and how it has helped you. Chances are, the company will write back to you to thank you for your comments and will ask you for permission to display your comments in their web site. Tell the company that you have no problems if they publish your comments, but request them to add a link to your site along with the testimonial. There is every possibility that the company will agree since publishing the URL of your web site gives more credibility to the testimonial.

Of course, please don’t go about giving testimonials to every company you can locate just because it will improve your link popularity

6) Posting to Message Boards and Discussion Lists

Another moderately effective method of increasing the link popularity of your site is to post to online message boards. At the end of every message that you post, you can sign off by mentioning your name and the URL of your web site. If the message board allows it, you can even include a short promotional blurb about your site at the end of your posts. However, make sure that the individual messages that are posted to that message board are archived in static HTML pages (i.e. the URLs for the individual messages should not contain a “?”). Otherwise, the search engines will consider these pages to be dynamic pages and may not spider these pages and hence, will not be able to find your link.

Email based discussion lists which are archived on the web in static HTML pages can also be used to boost the link popularity of your site in a similar manner. In this case, the signature file that you use with your email program should contain the URL for your web site.

7) Setting up new web sites

Yet another moderately effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is to set up new web sites and have these new sites link to your main site. If you are Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon.com), you can afford to purchase hundreds of new domains and have these new domains link to your main site. If you are not Jeff Bezos, you can simply set up new sites with some of the free web hosts. (Of course, your primary web site should always be hosted in a separate domain of its own). Simply add a few pages of unique content to each of your new sites, and have each of the pages in your new sites link to your main site.

If you use this technique, make sure that you do not duplicate content across multiple sites. If you do, the search engines might penalize your sites for spamming. You need to ensure that all the pages that you create for these new sites contain unique content.

The disadvantage of this method is that some search engines (like AltaVista) refuse to spider sites which are present in the free web hosts. Still, there are many search engines which will spider these sites, and hence, the link popularity of your main site will improve in these search engines.

Starting a Link Contest

A good method of improving the link popularity of your site is to give away prizes to other webmasters if they link to you. The prizes that you give out should ideally be something which other webmasters will find valuable enough to want to link to you, but which do not cost you too much. For instance, if you publish a newsletter, and have unsold ad inventory, you can give away some free advertisements in your newsletter to the winners. If you sell a software (or an ebook), you can give away a free copy of your software or ebook to the winners, since it doesn’t cost you anything to produce an additional copy of digital goods like software and ebooks.

Link contests work best if you run the contest on a continuous basis and if you declare new winners frequently. If you run the contest for a few months, and then stop it, the webmasters who had linked to you will all remove their links. However, if you run it on a continuous basis, and declare new winners every month or so, the webmasters will have the incentive to keep their links to your site.

Also, make sure that you require all participants to have a link to your site either in their home page, or in an internal page of their site which is linked to their home page. Also ensure that the page which contains the link is no more than two levels deep from their home page (i.e. it should not take more than two clicks to go from the home page to the page containing the link). If they don’t do this, the search engine spiders may not index the page which contains the link to your site, and hence, may not find your link.

9) Writing articles and allowing them to be re-published

This is by far one of the best ways of improving the link popularity of your site, and one of my favorites. Whenever I write an article on search engine placement, I first publish it in my newsletter and then I publish the article in my site as a separate web page. I also submit it to the following article submission sites:

Many webmasters and ezine publishers frequent these article directories in search of articles. Submitting my articles to these directories gives them the opportunity of re-publishing my articles. While I have had some success with each of the above directories, by far the best among them is the ezinearticles.com directory.

Now, at the end of each article, I mention that people are free to re-publish the article as long as they include my resource box (i.e. my bio) at the end of the article. I always include the URL of my site in the resource box. This means that whenever someone publishes one of my articles in his/her web site, I have another site linking to my site. Also, many ezine publishers archive their ezines in their web sites. If they have re-published my article in a particular issue, I again get a link.

Writing articles is also an excellent viral marketing tool. As some webmasters and ezine publishers publish my articles, other webmasters and ezine publishers will read my article. Some of them, in turn, will publish my article, which will again be read by other webmasters and ezine publishers, some of whom will publish it… and so on.

Also, since only web sites related to mine would be interested in publishing my articles, all these links tend to come from related sites, which, as I mentioned earlier, are more valuable than links from unrelated sites.

Writing articles, of course, has another very important benefit – if you write good articles, it makes you known as an expert in your field. This helps to improve your credibility, which makes people more comfortable about buying your products or services.

Some notes about writing articles:

10) Starting your own affiliate program

This is another excellent way by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. When you have your own affiliate program, you give other webmasters the incentive to link to you. In this case too, since most of these web sites will be related to the industry in which you are operating, these links will be more valuable than links from unrelated sites.

Now, when you start your affiliate program, you need to decide whether you want to run the program yourself, or whether you want to outsource it from a third party. While outsourcing your affiliate program has a number of benefits, doing so will not help you improve the link popularity of your site, because affiliates are going to link to the third party’s site. In order to improve the link popularity of your site, you need to ensure that the affiliate links are pointing to your domain.

The affiliate program software that I highly recommend and have used for the affiliate program of our search engine positioning services is Kowabunga Technologies’ My Affiliate Program, which is available here. Although this software is hosted in a domain owned by Kowabunga Technologies, they give you the option of having the affiliate links pointing to your own domain.

11) Submitting to the directories

This is by far the most important step as far as improving the link popularity of your site is concerned. As I mentioned before, what is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the quality of the links to your site. No links are as important as links from some of the major directories like Yahoo!, the Open Directory etc. Hence, it is vitally important that you get your site registered by these directories. Also, you should submit your site to as many of the smaller directories as possible.

1. Keyword Meta Tag

<META name=”keywords” content=”a, list, of, your, keywords”>
Before sitting down to write your meta tags, you must determine your key words, as the meta tags would be based on them. This would require some brainstorming. You need to think of words by which your web site should be found. You can check out the sites of your close competitors for ideas. Once you have a list of key words ready, ask your friends and more importantly your customers for more suggestions. This would help you come up with the more popular key words. It is a better strategy to identify a few important key words and focus your tags and content on them, instead of trying to coming up with every possible key word under the sun and cramming it in your web page.

Different search engines give different limits for the keyword tag. They range from 200 to 1000 characters. This means around 10 to 150 keywords. If your keyword limit exceeds the limit specified by the search engines, they would simply ignore the extra key words. However, do not try to repeat keywords, as this would be considered spamming. Use various synonyms of your most important keywords. Try to concentrate more on keywords that you have used in your web page content. This would contribute towards your keyword density.

Also include key phrases in your keyword meta tags. These would be a combination of keywords that the users may search for. For example, if you have an online jewelry store, you may want to include: handmade designer jewelry, online jewelry store, buy jewelry online. Someone who is searching for jewelry is likely to type in the above phrases , as a search for only the word “jewelry” would give too many search results.

Opinion is divided as to whether keywords should be separated by commas or not. If you don’t use commas the risk of repeating keywords is lowered. However, according to most search engine experts presence or absence of commas does not make a vast difference. Hence, inclusion of commas between keywords would largely be a matter of personal preference.

2. HTML Title Tag

<TITLE> Title of document </TITLE>
The HTML Title tag appears on top of your coded web page, and would also be seen by your web page readers. This tag is given extreme importance by almost all search engines when a web page is being ranked. Even search engines which ignore all the other tags like keywords, description and meta tag, definitely index the title tag. Therefore it is necessary to write your title tag very carefully.

Avoid using proper nouns (like the name of your company) in your title tag, unless you are a very well known business concern, and expect people to search for you by name. Instead make the title descriptive, including your most important keywords in it. Make sure that your title tag is placed right after the head tag, especially if you haven’t hand coded your web pages. Placing the title lower, would decrease its importance with the search engine.

Do keep in mind that inclusion of keywords in the title would have positive impact on keywords density and search engine ranking. Hence the title tag should be utilized to its fullest capacity. The search engines specify no word limit for title tags. However, to be safe and not to be accused of spamming, ten words would be a reasonable limit.

Don’t repeat your keywords more than twice in the title and don’t use all caps. Title case and lower case Title tags are seen to have a better impact on rankings as opposed to upper case tags.

3. Description Meta Tag

<META name=”description” content=”description of your website”>
The description of your website is extremely important. Not only would it be indexed by most search engines, it would also be used by directories in your website listing. Hence, searchers will use the description as a decisive factor to choose to visit your website.

The description must be short, typically 200 characters long. Do not use marketing slogans or hyped up language in the description. Instead, concentrate on the telling the reader about how they would benefit from visiting your website. Try including as many of your keywords as possible in the description. Make sure that the keywords included in your Title tag are there in the description tag as well.

Get an idea of how your competitors are writing their descriptions, by searching your targeted keywords on the major search engines. Make a note of the most effective descriptions, and what you like the most about them. Try to incorporate those factors in your own description.

4. Alt Tags

<IMG SRC=”location of graphic” ALT=”Description of graphic”>
If your website is in the form of an online catalog, you are bound to have a lot of images in it. Unfortunately, search engines prefer web pages which are text heavy, as they do not index images. Hence a website with more pictures than text is likely to get a lower ranking. One way of countering this is by providing descriptive and keyword heavy alt tags in your HTML coding.

Alt tags are used to describe images embedded in a web page and can play an important role in ranking websites, with search engines, that recognize them.

Alt tags not only make images accessible to search engines, they also help the visually impaired in navigating websites. Make your Alt tags descriptive and try to insert important keywords wherever you can. This would raise the overall keyword density of your web page with search engines.

Merely readjusting your meta tags would not guarantee you a high ranking on the search engines. Web page content and link popularity are also known to be major contributors. It is the combination of all the three factors which would eventually result in top rankings for your website. Keep trying and you will definitely reach the top.

- Irreversible damage to scalp – Broken keyboards and computer monitors – Loss of voice – Fire. . . and lots of it!
You are now going to learn how to choose the wrong keywords. In doing so, you will be able to fully comprehend exactly how to select the absolute best keyword or search phrase to focus on in your quest for a top ten search engine ranking.

1. Target Keywords That Nobody Searches For

Targeting keywords that no one searches for is a rather simple process. What you’ll want to do first, is go to the Word Tracker web site. If you do not already have an account with them, use the trial.

Enter a keyword that is closely related to your business, and WALA — a hot batch of freshly baked keywords. Click on the separate keywords, found on the left hand side of the page, and on the right side of the page you will see a listing of how many requests each one receives per month, as well as how many sites you are competing with.

Now, it is of great importance that you scroll down to the bottom of the page, and choose the keywords that receive the least requests per month. Zero is a good number, but three to five is an acceptable amount as well.

LESSON TO BE LEARNED: Make absolutely sure that people are searching for what you are optimizing for. If you optimize your page for something nobody searches for, then your efforts will all be in vain.

2. Choose Keywords With Lots Of Competition

Did you notice that this nifty web site also shows you how much competition you’re facing?

That’s right — in order to choose the wrong keywords to focus on, your secondary goal is to focus on those with the absolute maximum amount of competition. Don’t even bother with keywords which show two, three, or even four-digit numbers of competing web sites. Choosing these would almost ensure your success in achieving a decent ranking.

The keywords are listed in descending order, according to the number of requests per month – and not according to the amount of competition. Therefore, your goal here is to first choose the least popular keywords, and then select those with the greatest amount of competition.

LESSON TO BE LEARNED: The less competition you have, the greater your chance of achieving a top ten position. There is a good chance that 99.9% of the people you are competing with don’t even know what META tags are, so if there is very little competition, then success is at hand.

An explanation of META tags and other search engine basics can be found at http://www.mrfire.com/cgi-bin/a/t.cgi?searchengines

3. KEI Analysis? Go As Low As You Can Go!

Once you have placed a good amount of keywords in your basket, go onto the final step: KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) Analysis. For now, all you need to know is that a keyword’s KEI is based on a simple competition versus popularity ratio.

* For a detailed explanation of this, go to http://www.wordtracker.com/help/keihelp.html.

When choosing poor keywords, you should always shoot for a KEI of 0-30. Anything above that might give you a shot at a decent search engine ranking, and since your main goal here is to choose the worst keywords possible, you’ll definitely want to stay within these boundaries.

LESSON TO BE LEARNED: Don’t settle for a KEI of less than 100. Typically, I will not even attempt optimizing a keyword that has a KEI of less than 200, simply because I know it will save a lot of time if the best keyword is chosen right off the bat.

I’ve made the mistake of choosing the wrong keywords to focus on more than once. The result was an enormous amount of wasted time and energy, and was overall an extremely frustrating experience.

Until I discovered there was a service that could actually count the number of requests and competition for each keyword, I was playing Pin The Tail On The SEO Donkey. Don’t make the same mistake that I, and thousands of others have made over the years.

Do the research before optimizing your page for the search engines, and you will reap great rewards.

Simply having meta tags in your website does not guarantee more website visitors or high rankings in the search engines. You need to base these meta tags on carefully selected and targeted keywords. Here are a few guidelines to help you in selecting good and appropriate keywords.

1. Descriptive

The first rule is very simple. The keyword should describe the product or service you are offering. Don’t make the mistake of making your company name a keyword. It might be related to your service, but people would hardly search for it (unless you are a big and famous company). For example, I won’t put the words “BizTalk4U Consulting” in the meta tags of my website. Instead, I would use “web content writers”, which describes the services I offer.

Also, in the beginning I was using the words “website copy writing” in my meta tags and content, and was hardly getting any hits from search engines. When I did some research, I realized that people use the words “web content” for their website text, and not “web copy”. I had to change the entire text of my website, to optimize it for the keywords “web content”.

Therefore, please don’t assume that you know which keywords to target. Ask you customers and prospects about the phrases/ words they would use if they search for a product or service like yours. Make a list of all the answers and select your targeted keywords from them.

2. Popular

Once you have brainstormed and asked around about possible keywords you can target, it’s time to do some online research. Put in the keywords of your list in keyword suggestion tools to assess their popularity. Two tools for doing this are:

3. Words or Phrases?

Research shows that people usually use phrases of 2 to 3 keywords instead of a single word, when searching. This is because they have come to realize, that typing phrases would give them more relevant and targeted results. Therefore, it is advisable for webmasters to use key phrases instead of keywords for their meta tags and web content, so that they generate more targeted traffic. For example, if you are selling clothes for little girls, only using the word “clothes” would not bring targeted visitors. People searching for “clothes for little girls” would be more interested in what you have to offer.

4. Competitive

After you have researched the popularity of keywords, you may also want to look at the keywords your close competitors are using. You can do this by running a search for one of your chosen keywords, and observing the other keywords being used by the sites that come up. Wordtracker also gives you an analysis of the competition, which your keywords face.

5. Trade off

Once you have list of the most popular and competitive keywords it is time to make your final selection. If you use keywords that are extremely popular, they would also have more competition, and your chances for high ranking would be slim. On the other hand, if you try to use keywords with no competition, they would not be popular and no one would search for them. Hence, your website would come in very few search results, even if the ranking is higher. You need to make a trade off between popularity and competition. You must choose words, which are reasonably popular, and low in competition.

6. Focus

You must try to focus on a few qualified keywords instead of trying to target every phrase that is even remotely related to your product. If you use too many keywords in your meta tags and content, you will end up having very low keyword density, which would again result in lower rankings.

If you feel that there are many keywords that you simply can’t do without, then you must create several web pages. Each web page should focus on one or two keywords you are targeting. This strategy takes a lot of work but is bound to give you higher rankings and more exposure in the search engines.

7. No Cheating / Spamming

This is well known rule but worth repeating again and again. Do not cheat by using keywords that have nothing to do with your web site. You would get traffic that has no interest in your offering.

Do not spam by repeating your keywords too much in your meta tags and content. You can be banned from search engines for this. Also it is advisable to stay away from using tricks like cloaking and hidden text. Search engines hate these tricks, and would ban you forever.

These are the seven secrets of smart keyword selection. Choose your keywords wisely and carefully, so that you get the desired amount and quality of traffic to your website.