Attract Search Engine Traffic by Using Targeted Keyword Phrases

After you create a huge keyword list through brainstorming and via keyword tools, your goal is to find the words and phrases that are going to be the most effective in bringing lots of targeted traffic to your site. You can also use these words in your pay per click campaigns to maximize the paid side of search engine traffic. Search engine marketing is most effective when you attract people who are ready, willing and able to buy what you have to sell, not people in search of general information. In other words, you don't want to optimize your site for the most popular keywords in your niche. The most popular are the most fought over, the hardest to get and the ones that result in the least targeted traffic. That's three strikes. You're out. So don't go after the big, generic words until you are one of the big players in your niche. You'll experience more success sooner by taking a strategic approach to find words you can win with. You'll constantly struggle, however, if you spend your time competing against sites like ESPN for "sports," Travelocity for "travel" and WebMD for "health." Other phrases related to the main words are searched for often but have less competition. They have less competition because everyone's too busy fighting over the generic keywords. As a general rule, the more specific the phrase, the more targeted the traffic will be. Those who type multi-word keywords phrases are ready to take action. This is who you want to reach. This is who you want to find you in the search engine results pages. Consider these examples of specific phrases: instead of sports, try "youth baseball drills;" instead of travel, try "cheap cruises to Bahamas;" instead of health, try "workout tips for women." Having a huge list of keywords and the ability to see how many people are searching for phrases related to that word helps you find keywords and phrases you can win with. Sure, 5,000 people may search for sports and only 130 search for "youth baseball drills," but if you are ranked at the top for the latter and you have information related to youth baseball drills, you're going to convert an extremely high percentage of that traffic. But you would convert a much lower percentage from the 5,000 people just looking for anything related to sports. Software is available to help you target specific phrases in your niche because it does more than just show you what words have high amounts of traffic. It shows you how many other sites are competing for those words. To use software like this, you type in the broad keyword. It gives you the number of times people have searched for that word in Overture. Then it extracts information from Google and how many websites are using that term on their web pages. It also shows any related words and the Google sites competing for those words as well. But that's not all a good program will do for you. It also analyzes the information for you with a "Results divided by Searches" (R/S) value. The lower the R/S value, the better chance you have to win with that word or phrase. All you have to do is decide which words you want to target, then use those words and phrases within your website.

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