Choosing Keywords: What They Don't Tell You

By Author: Mike Arnold
Total Articles: 2
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Website Design What They Don't Tell You

Let me start off by saying that I am no web design expert but I have designed a few websites and the biggest challenge I found was choosing keywords. It seems like it would be easy but it is not.

Choosing keywords and keyword placement is the foundation of getting indexed properly in search engines, choosing the correct ones and placing them on your web page is not an easy task. First off your keywords or key phrases have to make sense so that a person visiting your website can understand what you are saying. All well and good, we can all do that. The problem comes when a machine is sent to look at your page all of the sudden it no longer looks the same. Take this page for example http://www.globalwebmonitor.com, after reading this page you would know the following things about this company:
Global Web Monitor sells business services.
The business services are designed for IT departments, website owners, web hosts and website developers.
The primary service Global Web Monitor sells is called Global Up Time.
Global Up Time is a monitoring service.
...
... lobal Up Time monitors websites, servers, networks and ports.
Global Up Time can do port security checks on servers and firewalls.
Global Up Time emails, phones or pages customers if one of their monitored items goes down.
Global Up Time can save its clients time, money, customers and business reputation.
Website monitoring is priced as low as $4.95 per month.
And finally you have the option of a 30 day free website monitoring trial.

Unfortunately the search engine robots and spiders are just machines and see this page completely different. If you run the keyword density program from Google for the web page http://www.globalwebmonitor.com you get keywords and key phrases that are completely useless to this particular website. A second problem that affects this web page is the stop word list that is used by many search engine spiders. The third problem with this page is words under 3 characters are filtered out. So what happened to the Global Web Monitor main page is that they ended up with key phrases like:
Global time monitoring
Servers network appliances
Global monitor overview
Status pages overview
Time monitoring
Services global
Monitor overview
Sign trial
Account enter
Check systems
And my personal favorite - Eliminates human

This is by no means all of the keyword phrases that were generated from the Global Web Monitor home page but you can see that even these few would drastically alter the way this web page would be indexed. If I were to look at these key words and had nothing else to go on I would think this website was about some Human eliminating global time monitoring network appliance, not website monitoring services. As a result, most of this web page needs to be reworded in such a way that the key phrases that are important to this website are placed with different words before and after each key phrase. Also the name of the monitoring service needs to be removed a few times.

When you run into a problem like the one on this page the best thing to do is get out the thesaurus and alter the wording on the page until the keywords that you want to represent your page equal around 12%. Use the keyword density tool found on Google http://www.googlerankings.com/kdindex.php to determine the percentages. Oh and make sure that completely unsuitable key phrases like ‘eliminates human' are not too prominent in the keyword list.

About the Author services research and development for Global Web Monitor Business Services