Making the most of keywords
People find websites via links from other sites, typing in the URL from printed material, guessing at domain names, clicking on ad links, and keyword searches. For most websites, keyword searches bring the majority of first-time visitors, through organic and/or paid keywords. Keywords offer us the opportunity to entice a highly targeted audience to our sites. If our audience finds exactly what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to become customers. As webmasters, we need to identify and use the best keywords for what we’re offering and (for organic search results) optimize our sites for those keywords.
Keyword terminology
For those who are new to the topic, let’s look at some of the terms used when discussing keywords:

Keywords are words or phrases that people enter in search engines to search for information.
Keyword density is the frequency that keywords are used on a page, the ratio of those words …

Making the Most of Keywords Part 2
Last week, we discussed how to research and choose the best keywords for your website and then put those keywords to work. Using the right keywords well can help bring a lot of traffic to your site. However, optimizing sites for keywords is just part of search engine optimization. With fine-tuning, keywords can do even more for us.
Study the stats
Any website traffic statistics program should show you what keywords are bringing visitors, what pages at other sites visitors come from, and what pages those visitors land on at your site. Better programs can provide statistics for each page and each visitor.
Unless your website is informational only, your conversion rate, or the percentage of site visitors who become customers, is just as important as traffic numbers.
Which keywords are bringing the most visitors, and to which pages? When visitors land at your website, do they land …

The Short Tail and Long Tail of Keyword Use
Let’s say that you sell gardening tools at your website. The keyword phrase “gardening tools” should bring you steady traffic, right? After all, it’s searched for over a hundred times a day. With a lot of search engine optimization work, including getting hundreds of inbound links, you might make it onto the first few pages of search results for that keyword. But be prepared to put in plenty of time — even the site currently at the bottom of the second page of the search results for it has over 1300 inbound links. General keyword phrases such as “gardening tools” are short tail keywords. At the other end of the spectrum, or the long tail, are very specific keyword phrases that are usually several words long.
How searchers use short tail and long tail keywords
Our fictional character Gloria is looking for gardening tools …

Keyword Selection: Web Hosting Tips
Scope out the webmaster sites and industry hubs and you’ll find a lot of content on the importance of keyword selection. Okay, assuming you know nothing about keyword selection, let’s start at the beginning.
What Are Keywords?
This article is provided by your web hosting company and explains keywords: They’re the words entered by search engine users looking for specific information on a topic, service or product. For example, if you were looking to buy a digital camera online you’d most likely go to Google, Yahoo, Ask or any number of other search engines, type ‘digital cameras’ into the search box and receive the results on the search engine results pages or SERPs.
Keywords are also used by search engines to classify your site according to top secret, highly-classified keyword taxonomies. A taxonomy is simply a sorting system. For example, all living things are sorted by kingdom, phylum, genus, …

Keywords With Kick:
Five Web Hosting Tips to Boost Keyword Power
Chances are, as a site owner, you fall in to one of two groups: (1) you thought a day or two about what you’d enter during a web search for your site, or (2) you bought or downloaded (OSS) a keyword generator and let the software make keyword selections.
A couple of problems here. First, it’s your site, it’s your business, it’s your expertise and skill set, so the keywords you might select will vary from those used by a novice, a first-time searcher or the individual search engine user who isn’t exactly sure what s/he is looking for.
Second, machine generated keyword lists are based strictly on data. Now, a good keyword generator will access that data from the search engine itself, and therefore makes a great tool for jogging your brain over to other keyword paths, but no one knows your …