Copyright 2001 Carol
Ann Waugh
Key
words are the words people use when they are searching the web for
information through a search engine.
- The first step is to brainstorm
with your marketing group. Begin by defining your company, products
and services. Picture yourselves in the different roles of your
customers (school librarian, young adult librarian, 3rd grade
teacher, principal, technology coordinator. Think about what they
would be searching for and what words they would use to conduct
the search. Write all these words down and sort them alphabetically.
Remove all stop words from the list (very common words, such as
"the," "as," "like," and so on.
Stop words also include overused words such as "Internet,
"web", "education", and "library"
for instance.)
- Remember to be specific
and well as general. For instance, if you are publishing a math
program, use words like math, geometry, triangles. In addition
to a general word like science, use other words like light, sound,
volcanoes. Dig deeply into the subjects of your products as well
as the titles and subtitles.
- Include plurals as well
as variations of these words like read, reads, readers, reading.
- Include common misspellings
and typos of your words like "libray" for library, "boks"
for books, and "bideos" for videos. Some of these common
misspellings come from typing the letter next to the correct letter
on a keyboard and some from regular errors like the ie vs. ei
combination.
- With the world getting
smaller, be sure to include your city, state and region.
- Be sure to include your
company name as well as the key executives.
- Now that you have your
list of keywords developed, go to a few search engines and type
the most important key words. Review the top ten sites that appear
on the list and download the source codes of these pages. Print
out their keywords (you'll find them at the top of the page with
this coding: <meta name="keywords" content> and
review for any important ones you may have missed. Add those to
your list.
- Sort your list from most
important to least important.
- Using a maximum of 1,024
characters (about 150-170 words) develop your key words for the
meta name field on your home page.
- Use a variation of this
list for developing the Meta Name keywords on all the remaining
pages of your web site but add new keywords that reflect the special
nature of each page at the beginning of the list and drop off
the least important words at the end, still keeping to the 1,024
character limit.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This article was written by Carol Ann Waugh, President of Xcellent
Marketing, a marketing and new business development firm specializing
in the educational and library market. Xcellent Marketing offers
a variety of marketing services to help publishers increase their
revenues and profits from identifying new markets, providing critiques
of web sites and marketing communications such as direct mail, catalogs,
advertisements, etc. as well as developing effective traditional
as well as Internet-based marketing plans. Carol can be reached
at (303) 388-5215 or at cwaugh@xcellentmarketing.com.
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