Choosing the right keywords to promote your website

Feb 24, 2006

Before you start promoting your website for better search engine ranking you should sit down and brainstorm on what keywords and key phrases you should be focusing upon. This solves two purposes: (1) it helps you target the right people; (2) it helps the right people find you. Once you get these two things going, you’ve arrived.

I’ll take a personal example, but for me it was a blessing in disguise. When I was designing websites, one fine day I decided to optimize my website for the terms “web designing”. And I did optimize my website for this phrase. For a whole year it hovered around first, second and third spots on Google for the term “web designing”. But how much work did I actually get?

In one year I got 3 projects. Two were through referrals and one was perhaps from a person who was quite impressed by the tutorials I had written. No work came from the search engines. Personally, as I’ve stated above, it was good for me because anyway I wanted to write content for websites instead of designing them. But it was quite a profound education.

When I chose the keywords, I wasn’t very careful about whom it would attract. It attracted people who wanted to learn web designing. — 99% of them. If you are looking for a person to make your website, you look for a “web designer” or a “web developer”, or something like that. You don’t look for “web designing”. When you want to learn about web designing, you search for “web designing” or “web designing tips” etc. I kept getting one or two queries everyday, but they mostly dealt with subjects regarding web designing and programming. Instead of giving me work, people asked for free advice and tips.