Keywords—Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines

This week we will discuss the key to improving your sites
listing in the top Internet search engines.

When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’
into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions
of pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancy
score.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. If
your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher,
the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your
first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are
most relevant for each of your sites.

There are three ways to figure out your keywords:

Ask your competitors

This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important
keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is
good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites
like yours. Open the top site, and once the home page has
downloaded, click on ‘View’ in your browser, and then
‘Source.’ That will reveal all the HTML used to build the
Web page, including all the keywords that have been
specially inserted.

For example, let’s say one of your websites sold nutritional
supplements. You could carry out a search for ‘vitamins’ in
Google. The top site there is called DrugEmporium.com, and
the keywords they list are "The Katz group, Snyders, Drug
Emporium, Drug, Drug Store, pharmacy, stores."

Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site.
Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lots
of other keywords that aren’t obviously listed—like
‘vitamins’ for example. But you can repeat the process on
other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty
long list.