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Keyword Research

Learn how to improve your search engine rankings with keyword targeting strategies.

How To Find Out What Keywords Your Customers Are Searching With

In this article I show you how to capture your most targeted visitors with the search engines by discovering what keywords they search with.

To get high search engine rankings, you must include the keywords that your potential customers are search with, in your web pages.

To find out what your most targeted keywords are, you need a keyword analysis service, such as Wordtracker.

Wordtracker will help you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service. It does this by providing analysis of actual searches conducted in metacrawler search engines.

You may wonder why it's important that you need to know what keywords your potential customers are searching with. Let me show you why with some examples.

Here are the most popular searches for the different variations of the search term, "keywords," according to Wordtracker:

Search Term Searches
keywords 273
Keywords 103
key words 68

Notice the different variations? The second keyword is capitalized. The third keyword is split into two words.

Here are the most popular searches for the different variations of the search term, "marketing strategies," according to Wordtracker:

Search Term Searches
marketing strategies 319
marketing strategy 280
Marketing Strategy 172
Marketing Strategies 22
Why Is It Important?

Well, if you wanted to target search engine users, you would want to include all the different variations of the keyword you want to target. This will help to persuade the search engines that your web page is relevant for the different keyword searches.

Another reason is that some search engines, such as Inktomi still take case sensitivity into consideration when ranking web pages.

Here's a table of Inktomi powered search sites that provide case-sensitive search results.

Search Case-Sensitivity
ICQ Full
LookSmart Partial
MSN Partial
Overture Full

Knowing exactly what your customers are searching for is very powerful.

I have used this strategy over the years to help me obtain thousands of top 30 rankings for my web sites, and those of my clients.

If you need to improve your search engine rankings, I highly recommend that you reconsider your keyword targeting strategies.

Read my review of Wordtracker to find out just exactly how it can help you growth your search engine traffic.

Michael Wong Michael Wong is a respected Internet marketing expert, and the author of a leading search engine optimization guide, numerous marketing tips, and reviews of marketing tools and ecommerce software.