On the one hand, keywords are important. On the other, the ‘right’ keywords are not a magic wand that will instantly deliver visitors to your site. There are many myths surrounding keywords, and it will be important to get some of those out of the way first.

keyword Myths and New World Scenarios…

Loading your meta keyword tag with many and varied versions and concepts related to your core keyword will probably have no effect whatsoever. While there was a time when this worked, the important search engines now ignore the meta keyword tag and instead look at the Title tag, the Description tag and the content of the page in order to determine ‘relevance’.  The keywords must be in the Content. Simple as that. This does not mean you should use keywords like punctuation - write naturally, the keywords should flow automatically.Look at this article and see how many ‘traffic‘, ‘backlink‘ and ‘article‘ keywords there are. I did not focus on this, it occurred naturally.

Relevance is only important if your site is relevant, and it is “Importance”, or “is this page significant in comparison to other pages offering the same or similar information?” that the search engines will establish before they ask the question “is this site relevant?”. And importance is determined by two things: backlinks and existing traffic.

backlinks: The Worst of Links and the Best

The worst way to get backlinks is to buy them. The search engines are not fooled, and the sudden appearance of hundreds of backlinks to your domain is likely to get you penalised. Slowly and surely is the secret, because what the search engines are looking for is organic growth, since that is how the natural process of word-of-mouth develops. Link Farms and Directories are equally dangerous - register at a couple, but don’t overdo it. And high Page Rank links are better than low-PR. It’s not about numbers, it’s about quality.

The most consistent, viral and the strategy with the greatest potential for natural expansion is article marketing. Hands down, this is simply the best method for developing backlinks. A single article may be replicated hundreds of times, and the scaling effect is truly awesome. Blog Comments to ‘DoFollow’ Blogs will also help, but don’t spam - my Blog is dofollow, I moderate the comments myself, and I delete the spam with extreme prejudice…

traffic: The More you Get, the More you Get...

The crazy thing about the above heading is that it’s true. If you’ve had not traffic to a page, the search engines will not give you some - they will send you traffic when you have shown that there is existng demand for what you are offering. If you’re already getting traffic, ideally from promotions to list memberships, safelists or ad sites, whether paid or free, and you have the prerequisite number of quality backlinks, and your keywords pass the relevance test, you’ll get traffic, always the best traffic because it’s very specifically targetted.

Next: The Long and the Short of it: The benefits of long-tailed keywords,and how to find them…

Here to Help,
Derek
(just call me D!)