Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

In web marketing, the best way to get visitors to your site is to think like them when searching and to choose the right keywords. The truth is, keywords aren’t the focus of a good SEO strategy — visibility, authority, and good writing are.

Here, you will find out how to pick the right keywords to bring traffic to your business website. Don’t drive yourself crazy with keyword research. Your time is better spent on writing great stuff, working in social media, and improving your site. But some basic research always helps.

Before you start thinking about tools, you must understand that you are not optimizing for the keywords you like or think should be associated with your product or service. You are optimizing for the keywords that potential customers associate with your product or service.

For example, say that you sell salad through the Internet. You’ve found a miraculous way to keep vegetables crisp and prevent lettuce from wilting, and you ship salad to suburban dwellers everywhere.

You research keywords and find that no one searches for salad. They search for mixed greens instead. You have a choice to make. You can insist on optimizing for salad, because that is what you sell. Or, you can optimize for mixed greens, get visitors, and then educate them as to why salad is better.

Don’t try to shove your own beliefs about your product or service on your customers by picking the keywords you think they should use to find you. That never works in marketing or search engine optimization. Understand what your visitors will use to find you. You can educate them as to why you’re different, and why they should care once they have arrived on your site.

If a customer searches for bicycles and clicks a link to your site, she’ll expect to see information about bicycles. If you sell cars, don’t optimize for bicycles and then try to tell folks why cars are better. That just frustrates them. Go with your strengths: Optimize for cars.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

John Arnold is the author of E-Mail Marketing For Dummies and coauthor of Mobile Marketing For Dummies.

Ian Lurie is President of Portent, Inc.

Marty Dickinson is President of HereNextYear.

Elizabeth Marsten is Director of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc.

Michael Becker is the Managing Director of North America at the Mobile Marketing Association.

This article can be found in the category: