Choosing Your Keywords

When you’ve finished working with a keyword tool, look at the final list to determine how popular a keyword phrase actually is. You may find that many of your original terms are not worth bothering with. My clients often have terms on
their preliminary lists — the lists they put together without the use of a keyword tool — that are virtually never used. You’ll also find other terms near the top of the final list that you hadn’t thought about. The next several sections help you clean up this list.

Removing ambiguous terms
Scan through your list for ambiguous terms, keyword phrases that probably won’t do you any good for various reasons.

You missed the target
Take a look at your list to determine whether you have any words that may have different meanings to different people. Sometimes you can immediately spot such his site. To him, the term referred to Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
But to the vast majority of searchers, cam means something different. Search Wordtracker on the term cam, and you come up with phrases such as web cams, web cam, free web cams, live web cams, cam, cams, live cams, live web cams, and so on. To most searchers, the term cam refers to Web cams, cameras used to place pictures and videos into Web sites. The phrases from this example generate a tremendous amount of competition, but few of them would be useful to my client.

Ambiguous terms
A client of mine wanted to promote a product designed for controlling fires. One common term he came up with was fire control system. However, he discovered that when he searched on that term, most sites that turned up don’t promote products relating to stopping fires. Rather, they’re sites related to fire control in the military sense: weapons-fire control.

This kind of ambiguity is something you really can’t determine from a system such as Wordtracker, which tells you how often people search on a term. In fact, it’s often hard to spot such terms even by searching to see what turns up when you use the phrase. If a particular type of Web site turns up when you search for the phrase, does that mean people using the phrase are looking for that type of site? You can’t say for sure. A detailed analysis of your Web site’s access logs may give you an idea; see Chapter 18 for the details.

Very broad terms
Look at your list for terms that are incredibly broad, too general to be of use. You may be tempted to go after high-ranking words, but make sure that people are really searching for your products when they type in the word.
Suppose that your site is promoting degrees in information technology. You discover that around 40 people search for this term each day, but approximately 1,500 people a day search on the term information technology. Do you think many people searching on the term information technology are really looking for a degree? Probably not. Although the term generates 40,000 to 50,000 searches a month, few of these will be your targets. Here are a few reasons
why you should forgo this term:
_ It’s probably a very competitive term, which means ranking well on it would be difficult.
_ You may be better off spending the time and effort focusing on another, more relevant term.
_ It’s difficult to optimize Web pages for a whole bunch of search terms (see Chapter 6), so if you optimize for one term, you won’t be optimizing for another, perhaps more appropriate, term. terms. One of my clients thought he should use the term cam on