Key words are the words people use when they are searching the web for information through a search engine.

1) 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.)

2) 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.

3) Include plurals as well as variations of these words like read, reads, readers, reading.

4) 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.

5) With the world getting smaller, be sure to include your city, state and region.

6) Be sure to include your company name as well as the key executives.

7) 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.

8) Sort your list from most important to least important.

9) Using a maximum of 1,024 characters (about 150-170 words) develop your key words for the meta name field on your home page.

10) 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 tip was written by Carol Ann Waugh, President of Xcellent Marketing, a marketing and new business development firm specializing in the education and library markets. Xcellent Marketing offers a variety of marketing services to help publishers increase their sales and profits from identifying new markets, providing critiques of web sites and marketing communications such as direct mail, catalogs, space ads, etc., as well as developing effective marketing plans. Carol can be reached at cwaugh@xcellentmarketing.com or by calling (303) 388-5215.