Optimization experts advise comparing demand to supply to find good keywords for your web pages. My experience, though, is that many of my pages with “good ratio” keywords never show up in search engine results, while others that I shouldn’t be able to compete with, are right there on the first page of results. This is because it isn’t just quantity, but the quality of the competition that matters. Supply/demand ratios just don’t give the information necessary.

Better Keyword Research

Here is a better and easier way to do your keyword research. First, Find keywords at the Yahoo site (formerly Overture): http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch . Click on “Keyword Selector Tool,” to see how much traffic a keyword phrase had last month. Get together a list of words and phrase with decent demand. This depends on the nature of your site, but for my own sites, I won’t optimise a a page for a keyword with less than a few hundred searches per month.

Next, go to http://toolbar.google.com , and install the free Google toolbar on your browser. With this you can see the “pagerank” of any web page. This is a ranking between 0 and 10 that Google uses to help determine which sites show up in the results when a search is done. See what ranking your own pages have. This tells you (roughly) how well you can compete against other pages for given terms, assuming you are doing okay with your on-page optimization too.

This also is a guide to the page rank you can get on any new pages you create. If you have a pagerank of three on several of your site’s internal pages, you can probably have the same (with a little time) on new pages. You do this by internally linking to the new pages, especially from the homepage and site map, as well as from any other relevant pages.

To complete your keyword research, type your potential keywords one by one, into Google or another search engine. Click through to the pages in the first ten results, and note the pagerank of each. If a couple of them have a page rank that is lower than that of your existing pages, you can probably compete on that keyword phrase. Create pages that are optimized for these keywords.

If the first ten results have a page rank of 5 or higher, and your own pages are 3, you can’t compete (yet). Sometimes you’ll search keywords with 3,000 searches per month, and 300,000 results, yet the first ten results will have pageranks of 2 and 3. Others with 30,000 searches and 10,000 results will have only pagerank 5 or higher results. Obviously, demand/supply ratios are not all that matters. This is a better way to do keyword research.

Many coaching web sites lack good page titles. They are often completely ignored during the design process or just poorly written.
This causes two main problems:

Firstly, a poorly written title won’t get many clicks.
Here’s what happens …

When someone performs a search, they are provided with a list of results to choose from. This list uses your page titles to display to the person doing the search. If your page title doesn’t grab attention, it won’t be clicked on.

It’s like writing a great book on how to catch fish, but giving it a crumby title of “A Fishing Book.” It will easily get passed up in favor of the book next to it titled, “How to Catching A Lot of Fish – Easily”

The second problem is lower search engine rankings.

Generally speaking, if your page titles don’t contain keywords that people are searching for, then your pages will have a lower ranking than if your title did have those keywords.

So you will want to make sure you write good titles for your web site page to both increase your rankings and to attract people to click to your web site.

So, where do I find the page title?

It can be found in the html source code, towards the top of the page, (with the word title before and after the title text).

So, how do you write good title tags?

The two biggest things to keep in mind when writing your titles are:

1. Include your keywords in your title. Search engines use the words in the title tag to identify what your web page is about. Including your keywords in the title tag will improve its ranking in search engines.

2. Make your title attention-grabbing. As mentioned before, search engines use page titles when displaying results. If you make it attention-grabbing, it can win more clicks and bring more traffic to your web site.

Here’s more advice on writing attractive, keyword rich title tags:
Include your keywords towards the beginning of the title. This gives those keywords more prominence.

* Avoid filler-words. Words like “the,” “a,” and “and” just take up space and don’t help your ranking.

* Use your name, your patented coaching process, book title or other well-known trademark in the title tags of the pages in which they are mentioned.

* Don’t put “John Smith – Business Coach.” This won’t grab attention as much as something like “Business Coach – Grow your business 200%.”
Use about eight words. This is the amount that is visible in search engine result pages.

* Write titles that draw attention. Some techniques include: using keywords that people are searching on, using problem statements, benefit statements.

* Be sure your titles accurately reflect what is on the page. Misleading titles disappoint users and search engines may penalize your site.

* Don’t overstuff your page title with keywords. It makes for a bad looking title in search listings and puts your page at risk for search engine penalties.

* Don’t keep the same title tag across multiple pages. This implies the pages are of the same content and they really aren’t – a minus in the eyes of search engines.

Here’s an example of a title tag for the home page of a career coach web site:

“Career Coach for Accountants and Lawyers – Increase Your Earnings”

You can see that this title includes a benefit statement, relevant keywords, and the target audience’s name – good for rankings and good for getting attention.

In conclusion, make your title keyword-rich for search engines and attention-grabbing for searchers. It’s an easy way to boost your search engine visibility and bring more visitors to your web site – more possible clients!