**More Places for Keywords**

There are other places that search engine spiders look for keywords besides your website copy. If at all possible try to get a domain name with one of your keywords in it. For instance if you sell dog collars, a name you might want for your website would be www.dogcollarsales.com or something like that. It might take some thinking and some time to come up with a related name that someone hasn’t already taken, but it can be done.

Another good place for keywords is in your page title. Instead of putting name of your business which most people won’t know, instead place a keyword rich sentence or phrase. Using dog collar business example again here is a title page you could use.

Dog Collars – We sell dog collars and other products for your beloved pet.

It clearly tells search engines what page is about. Remember that title of your website is indexed by search engines and is part of what is shown to someone who is searching on that keyword.

So if I typed in dog collars into my search engine, title from above and my meta tag description would show in my search results. Make sure you put some thought into your title.

This rule also applies to your meta tag description which is also viewed when a search engine pulls up your site. Make it only one or two keyword rich sentences. The meta tag keyword has less impact today then it did a few years ago, but I still recommend adding a few keywords. Don’t go overboard and write out 50 keywords or your site will be considered spam to search engines.

Most websites that are designed today rely heavily on graphical content and not much else. Another tip on keyword placement is to try to place a keyword rich sentence near very top of your page. Some people have spots for banners and such at top of their pages, this is same kind of idea and can be made to look pretty and not out of place. This is important because search engine robots start at top of your page and work down. The closer to top of page you have keywords more search engines will think your page is relevant.

**A Frontpage Trick**

Search engine spiders will look at a block of text and if any words or phrases are typed in an H1 size then they consider that phrase to be of utmost importance to page. This is a great place to have a keyword look very important to search engines.

Now for those of you who don’t know, an H1 size is pretty big and would definitely stand out on your page and can oftentimes look a little ugly. There are ways around this if you know CSS well, but if you are designing your site yourself and have no clue what CSS even is then I can help you.

*This tip is only for those of you who are using Frontpage as your web editor.*

You can show search engines that text is in an H1 size, but then change size of text back down to whatever size you want instead. Here’s how you do it.

In Frontpage select text you want to use and set it to an H1 size. Then go over to font size drop down and change it to whatever size you want to use. It’s that easy.

Now one drawback to using this technique is that there will be empty space around phrase that is designated as an H1 size. Basically it is still taking up same amount of room it normally would, it just doesn’t look so blatantly obvious. This technique is best used for titles of paragraphs or break points in paragraphs, so that it won’t look weird to your visitors.

**The ALT Tag**

This design tip is a pretty clever way to get an extra keyword or two into your site. The ALT tag is an HTML tag that is used when you want to give a written description for a graphic element on page. It was designed initially so that if someone couldn’t download your pictures, they could see an alternative description in text describing picture.

Instead of describing picture you can place a keyword in alt tag instead. Here’s an example of what HTML code would look like.

img border="0" src="myimage.jpg" width="640" height="150" alt="keyword phrase"

These are just a few proven techniques when designing your site to improve your search engine ranking.

Leah West

2. Overture is actually a paid per click advertising center, but they do offer a keyword search tool if you can find it.

They like to move it around a lot so it doesn't get too abused. As of this article you can find it by going to www.overture.com then clicking on 'advertiser center' in top right corner. Then under tools table on right click on 'keyword selector tool'.

This tool is similar to one at wordtracker but does not give you as in depth a search nor as many options. It is still good though to use different resources so that your making sure to get all related keywords you possibly can.

3. Teoma is an often overlooked place to also gather keywords. It is actually a search engine of its own, but has a cool little feature that can help you choose more keywords.

When you type in a word or phrase to search it also gives you two sections on right hand side that can help you out.

The first is 'refine' which shows related keywords to your search that you might also want to search on. These are extra keywords. You can keep clicking on keywords in this section with each new page offering more related searches.

The second section is called 'resources' which provides websites that have gatheres links on your specific search topic. This is great to see what kind of competition you got going and check out what works and what doesn't.

So there you go, three ways to conduct a really thorough keyword research.

Leah West http://www.westmarketing-design.com