Cataweb Online S.L.’s First Step In Optimization: The Keywords

Before you can optimize your site to rank high for a specific search on a search engine, the first thing we at Cataweb Online S.L. do is choose the right keywords.  As an example, let’s say your spankin’ new website is selling a weight loss product.  To optimize it, you’d think you have to make the main keyword “weight loss”, right?  Wrong!  If you start out with a keyword like that to anchor your site’s SEO, you probably won’t get very far up in the rankings.  That’s because there will be bigger and more established sites out there using that same keyword, so the competition will be cutthroat for it.

So the first thing you should do is use a very important online SEO tool, which you can find from various sites, and this is the keyword tool.  I personally use the Good Keywords software, which is freeware and is only around 500kb in size.  Installing it gives you a tool to check up on generic keywords you’re interested in and gives suggestions on other good keywords derived from your original choice.  So if we take your “weight loss” keyword and enter it, what will come out is a list of terms related to it.

In terms of ranking, “weight loss” comes out on top of course, and in our example, it got 1,413,194 searches for the month, based on the Overture engine, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2003.  That’s a lot of searches, and if you want to cross check the results using even just the Google search engine, you’ll see that almost 20,000,000 pages come out for the term “weight loss”.  Those are the pages you’ll be competing against, so it’s best to scroll down the list of keyword options.

Go for more specific terms, like “weight loss story” or “weight loss picture”, which at the time we checked ths out, ranked somewhere in the middle of the Top 100 related keywords for “weight loss”, with maybe 3,000+ searches a day.  Choose your 3 to 4 key phrases from those suggestions and those are the ones you will be using as keywords for your site.  With a lower ranking than the top generic keyword, it should be easier to overtake the top site for those keywords, instead of clawing your way up a list of 20,000,000 entries!  At least that’s what we at Cataweb Online S.L. recommend.