The art of Keywords

Having your website show up in search engines is hard. There are millions of other sites competing, some of them good, some of them great and some dismal. But without promoting your business and website yourself in your every day work, your site won't often be seen.

The search engines don't rely on meta tags or keywords embedded in your html the way they used to, but you can still add them. The thing is to be smart about them. You want to make sure that the words to add as keywords are also in your site. It is better to create your text in your site to include the main ideas for your business than rely on keywords to have people find your site.

A client recently has been struggling to come up with a list of keywords for me. I suggested he narrow it down to 25. He finally said "I can't get just 25" so I said that it was okay if there were a few more. When I got the page of keywords, there were 260 on the page. I was thinking that he couldn't narrow it down to under 30!

And there was a lot of duplication on there. A smarter way to include keywords is to do the following.

1. Make the Titles in your page work for you. Don't just name your contact page "Conact us" Put something like "for the best in Tractor parts and Accessories call Company X" That gets in a few great keywords, ie tractor, parts, accessories and your company's name. And it is relevant.
2. Make sure all your images have captions. It is good for the blind who can't see the image to know what it was, and is another opportunity to relate it to the page.
3. Go to GoogleAdWords: Keyword Tool, and put in some of the words that you think your potential customers would use to find you and see how popular they are in searches. Google not only ranks them for the past month, but gives you suggestions on other related words or phrases. It may help you if you are stuck. If none of these popular words are in your site at all, and they do relate to your product or service (and why aren't they?) then consider re-writing the text to include them.

The search engines search all these things as well as your meta tags, and you want to take advantage of all of this.

National Do Not Call Register

I wrote a while ago about a list you could put your telephone number on to reduce the number of annoying telemarketing calls you receive. The Canadian Government started an official "Do Not Call" register on September 30th, 2008, so you can register with them as well.

The web address is www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca

You can put your telephone, cell phone, fax number etc all on this registry. For some reason it has an expiry date. I'm not sure why that is, are you going to be more interested in hearing from people about new windows at 8:30 at night in three years from now? Doubt it somehow.

It doesn't promise that the calls will stop right away, nor will all the people that call you now have to stop either. Banks you deal with, charities etc are exempt, but it is a start and you can tell each one you receive a call from to please take you off their list as you don't want any further calls. I've done this will Bell Canada for the simple fact that every time they call with an "offer" my bill is changed whether I've agreed to anything or not.