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For many websites, search engines, especially Google, bring more than 80 percent of their new visitors. According to a recent survey conducted by Marketingsherpa, 59 percent of B2B marketers have disclosed that they plan to increase their search engine optimization budgets for next year. This trend proves that most of the online businesses started to realize how crucial it is to optimize their web pages for search engines. If you are still lamenting why you are not getting enough targeted visitors from search engines, it is about time you take some very basic actions. Search engine optimization is a complex issue comprised of a number of aspects, i.e. valuable content, meta-tag optimization, keywords optimization, back links etc. However, if you just concentrate and work on one aspect - keywords, you will be able to increase site visibility dramatically. On the other hand, failure to take this fundamental search characteristic seriously means loosing out to the competitors.

What does it mean for you to optimize your web pages with targeted keywords? Ideally, as a business you should know which words or phrases people will use to make a query on a search engine when they look for products or services you sell. Your goal is to get your website within ten top search positions for specific keywords or phrase. Getting your website on the first page for a query is a time consuming and a tedious job, but, if you get it done, the outcome will be enormously beneficial for your website. Your website will receive increased targeted traffic with solid top search engine placements for years to come.

There is nothing more disappointing than working hard to get top ranking for a certain key phrase and then realize that you are targeting for wrong type of visitors. How do you choose your key words and phrases and optimize your pages accordingly?

1. Make a list of keywords that you think buyers might use to search for products and services you sell. If you are having trouble with this, ask your customers what keywords they would use to find your products and services.

2. Use a Thesaurus to check synonyms of the words and phrases that you have chosen. You may come up with additional keywords. A good online source of dictionary and thesaurus is http://thesaurus.reference.com/. Another great tool is Gorank's ontology finder. It's a related keywords look up tool located at http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/.

3. Eliminate all single words from the list! In most of the cases, with single words the range is either too broad to target specific visitors or competition is so high, it's not worth the try!

4. Go to several of your competitors' websites and check out what keywords they are focusing on by viewing the HTML source of the pages. Select only those competitors, who have high-ranked sites for your primary products or services.

5. Now go to Yahoo! pay per click search marketing site Overture, which has an excellent keyword selection tool. Type in your word, combination of words or phrase in the given field and see how many times your specific term was searched on last month, and related searches that include your given keywords. The address is http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.

6. Google also has a similar tool located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox. If you enter a keyword to show matching query, the tool will give you two lists. The list on the left consists of specific search terms and on the right you will see a number of words and terms related to the keyword or term that you inserted. Pay special attention to the list on the right as you might find a number of words and terms that you have never thought of.

7. Get the search phrases or terms that are popular enough and fall into your criteria from above mentioned lists.

8. Now let's try to find whether you should use your keyword in singular or plural, or which one of the two similar search terms or phrases are more desirable by going to the following page: http://www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp. When you enter two search terms, you will see which one is more popular and appears more times on the Internet.

9. Now that you have a number of keywords, cluster two to three of them for one single page. Remember, every page of your site should be built surrounding one single theme and focused on maximum two to three keywords.

10. Use these keywords for the specific web page. Make sure you don't over use keywords on a page. Search engine spider may consider that you are spamming and may penalize you if it sees too much use of same words on a page. How do you know that you are not over using keywords? There are tools to check what the density of a keyword on a webpage is. Again Gorank has several tools for checking keyword density at http://www.gorank.com/seotools/. You can verify what is the keyword density used by top ten ranked web pages for a particular keyword. Another place where you can analyze keyword density for your content is http://www.gorank.com/seotools/. This tool allows you to see ratio of keywords density with a given text dynamically.

11. You also have to use keywords in your Meta tags, title and, if possible, in the page link itself for getting positive result. Don't forget to use keywords on your images' alternative texts as well.

Of course, optimizing your web pages for keywords will dramatically improve your web page ranking. However, this alone might not be able to position your page at the top. Once you are done with your keyword optimization you should start working on getting quality backward links to your page. Combination of these two is often sufficient to achieve remarkable result in your search engine optimization efforts.

About the Author
Nowshade Kabir is CEO of Rusbiz.com, a global B2B portal for small and midsize companies. Our distinctive web stores along with many outstanding features like e-marketplace, e-catalog,