If you know anything about search engine optimization, you know that a great deal of it centers on keywords. Keywords are those words and phrases that you want to get associated with your site in search engine indexes. Unfortunately for their SEO efforts, a lot of site owners waste their time on keywords that aren’t quite as useful as those site owners believe. Here are some things to consider about the search engine keywords you’re using as well as whether they’re a complete waste of time or not.
Unclear
Many words and phrases can mean dramatically different things depending upon their context. The same is true for keywords. You need to make certain that the keywords you are trying to get associated with are actually specific to your site, your product, your service or whatever else it is you’re trying to promote on your website.
Here’s an example.
Imagine that you own an auto dealership that sells environmentally friendly cars, electric cars among them. The keyword phrase “electric cars” could refer to many different things. It could refer to cars that are powered by sophisticated batteries rather than by internal combustion engines. It could refer to remote control cars that collectors and children like to play with or it could even refer to model train cars for hobbyists. The key word phrase is incredibly vague in terms of its meaning.
This means that it doesn’t pass the test of being particularly specific to your site. Competing for this keyword phrase would mean not only competing with other car dealerships, it would also mean competing with every other site that needed those keywords, even if they had an entirely different meaning in the context of those sites.
Too Much Competition
Using the same example as above, consider how much of a waste of resources it is to go after keywords for which there is too much competition. For example, if you own the auto dealership in the example above and actually tried to get your site search engine optimized for the word “car”, you would be up against an incredible amount of competition and would not likely have much luck.
If your keywords aren’t ones that you can realistically compete for – and being realistic does include considering your budget versus the budgets of the other sites vying for those keywords – you may be wasting your time. Picking good keywords takes a lot of time. Optimizing for them can also take a lot of time and, in some cases, can be expensive.
You need to make certain that you’re picking keywords that you can realistically get good search engine positioning for and that you’re not throwing good money after bad in a quest to get associated with a keyword that is far too popular with other larger, sites.
Do People Use It?
There’s more than one webmaster out there right now working as hard as they can to get top position for a keyword that nobody ever uses in a search. It’s guaranteed. Using the car dealership example again, imagine the webmaster for that site putting resources into getting optimized for the keyword phrase “environmentally friendly green electric cars with powerful motors”. It’s very unlikely that a significant amount of people would ever use that phrase in a search engine and, therefore, it’s not a very good investment of time or money for the example site’s SEO program.

Related Blogger Tips