The idea behind on-site keyword selection is to add words to your page title that will be most effective in attracting your target market. When choosing on-site keywords it is helpful to get into the mindset of the consumer and try to imagine what they would type into Google or another popular search engine when looking for the item or products that you are selling.

When choosing words for say fashion and retail oriented websites, if we were choosing the keywords for a page offering jackets for the cold winter then we would ask ourselves questions about the product being offered: What price range is it in? where is it appropriate to wear? is it fashionable/trendy? All of these questions will affect which keywords will pertain to it the most.

For example if you were going to do the on-site keywords for Jet fashions winter jackets that they are marketing to a low to mid level income group then we would think of the words that these people may use: Cheap, affordable, jacket, winter, warm, fashion, etc. In the end the tag would look something like this: Affordable winter wear – Jacket Fashion – Jet stores

Take note that I only used two dashes. Some might differ on this theory but I believe that you can’t just optimise for search engines but also for users. If your title tag is filled with dashes and keywords, how will this look when it appears in the search results? Not too good I bet! You want to find a happy medium between user experience and search engine optimisation. Another reason for this is because if someone had to share the post / page inside Facebook, it will pull the title and if the title has too many dashes and keywords in it, again it will have a much lower click through rate than those who have taken the user into account.

Before you start choosing any of your keywords it is very advantageous to check out Google adwords. With this you are able to plug in all of your keywords and check how much competition is around for each individual keyword. If the word had a lot of competition (in other words it costs a lot to use this word in a PPC campaign) then that indicates the word is highly used and therefore is an effective keyword. With this is mind, it is still very important to remain with a focus on your exact product. “Luxurious coat” may be a very competitive keyword, however once the user clicks through and sees the product they will see that it is in fact an “affordable coat” they will bounce from that page immediately and you will lose potential revenue. Searching for effective keywords shouldn’t be a time consuming task, it only needs to be done every few weeks or so, not every single time you are choosing keywords for a page.

Keywords are essential in directing your target audience to the various pages on your website, they should be considered very carefully. In the end a page that has been internally optimised is going to be much more successful than one that has not.

About Michael Prince

Contributor to WebGrowth and content writer for the Rawson Property Group marketing team.