Affiliate Marketing Tips - How to Search Engine Optimise the Meta Keywords For Your Website

There are many ways in driving traffic to a website, for e.g., pay-per-click advertising, etc. But these cost a lot in the long run, especially if you have a niche affiliate website that is highly competitive. Do you know a simple tweak of your website's meta "keywords" tag can help you optimize the chances of visitors finding your website by search engines instead? And the best part of it is, there is absolutely no cost if you do it yourself!

But how do you know what keywords are good enough to capture the traffic? The right keywords will draw targeted visitors who are looking for information in your niche to your website and not any Tom, Dick or Harry. Targeted visitors are important as they probably have set their mind in purchasing the product and are just searching on the internet for more information.

There are three basic steps to finding the best meta "keywords" for your website.

1) Brainstorm a draft list of phrases and words that are closely related to your website content

Write down as many words and phrases you can think of, in different permutations, according to how you think your targeted visitors will do the search. You can also use singular and plural forms of the words if necessary.

2) Research on these keywords

With these keywords, you can conduct a search to find out how often they are searched by "real" traffic with search term suggestion tools, like Word Tracker (freekeywords.wordtracker.com). These are free to use and are really useful in other aspects of affiliate marketing as well. Highlight those keywords that are highly sought for, and discard those that result in few or even no searches. In the process of your research, you may also see some keywords that are not in your brainstorm list, but are actively searched. Pick up these keywords as well.

3) Check out the competition for your keywords

Now that you have a list of short listed keywords that you can probably use for your meta "keywords" tag, one by one, check out your competition with Google search engine. Find out the Google Page Rank for the last website on the first page of the search results for a particular keyword. If the last website has an average Page Rank of 3 or 4, keep the keyword. Repeat the process for all keywords. Keywords that show results with websites of high Page Rank even at the last position are deemed to be too competitive, you may consider discarding them. This is because even if you optimise your website with this keyword, it's quite unlikely you will be on the first page of the Google search results. Unless you reach a higher Page Rank than them!

After finding the appropriate keywords that could possibly get you ranked high in Google, select no more than 30 of them to put at your meta "keywords" tag. Also do not get the idea that repeating the same keywords (unless they differ as singular and plural) will give you better search results. You will get penalised by Google instead.

You may wish to customise these meta "keywords" for different pages of your website as well. Although this may seem very time consuming, but it should show some improvements in your search engine traffic after some time.

Want a shortcut? This could help!

Authored By:
Angela Tay