Targeting Keywords

Targeting keywords is a specialized aspect of e-Marketing where web site content is written so that it is recognized by search engines as being an important destination for search engine users who use the targeting keywords or phrases being addressed.  Put another way...if you want your web site to be highly placed when a search engine user types in the phrase "chocolate cake", then you write your website content so that it contains lots of information in the appropriate places and ways so that the website finds your website to be one of the top 10 places for information on that subject.

In years past, the common practice was to place keywords and phrases in the HTML code of the website called "meta tags".  You could simply list the words you wanted to be found under and that was that.  For many reasons including the fact that there was wide-spread abuse of this, none of the major search engines use this technique alone anymore.  A few of the largest search engines completely disregard the keyword meta tag completely.

Keyword Analysis

Targeting keywords begins with a serious effort to find out what the "best" keywords and phrases are for a particular website.  It begins with an interview with the website owner / managers.  Their list is then investigated using special services of Designed Internet Solutions which interrogate the major search engines to see how this list of keywords compares with what people actually type in when searching the these items.  Once this list is obtained, the keywords are analyzed further to see how competitive they are and how much value each one has.  With this information in hand, a strategy for targeting keywords or phrase is established.

Page Content Development

With a targeting keywords strategy for each keyword or phrase, it is time to prepare adequate amounts of written content to make the search engine understand that your website is important enough for each targeting keywords to return it as a top result to a searcher.  This is done by carefully writing the content so there is a discussion of the keyword in a manner that optimizes the algorithm used by the major search engines.  This takes a lot of effort, but it is the only way to achieve an efficient and speedy rise in relevance to targeting keywords.  In most cases, a great deal of content is necessary to sufficiently build the targeting keywords importance to the degree recognized by the search engine.  When this is done, the pages may need to be submitted to the search engines.

Search Engine Page Submission

Depending upon the existing interaction of major search engines and your website, it may be necessary to submit the Keyword Targeting pages to the search engines.  However, in many cases it is not necessary to submit these pages.  A rule of thumb is that if your web site is not being visited by the major search engine spiders / robots at least once a day, you should submit the pages to the search engines.

Keyword Monitoring and Reporting

When the work is done and the pages are launched, it is necessary to monitor the activity of the website to these keywords  and phrases.  At a minimum of once each week the major search engines should be interrogated to see what ranking they give your website.  If satisfactory upward movement is seen and about one month has transpired, things are on-track.  If after 4 to 8 weeks, inadequate upward movement has been seen, then more work must be done to the website content writing.

For keyword targeting to be successful, you must dedicate a lot of time to the work and many weeks of monitoring before it will take affect.