How to choose keywords for your website

As a website owner, one of the things that really holds you up from time to time is the matter of choosing keywords to use for your website. Quite honestly, keyword research isn’t all that difficult, but then I’ve been in this game for years and know a few tricks that make choosing keywords a breeze.

Now, this post isn’t going to show you any special keyword research tools, and this tip will not work for website owners with brand new websites. However, it will help you to choose keywords that are guaranteed to get you traffic from search engines.

An easy way to choose keywords for your website
It’s quite simple – just use your website’s traffic logs to help you choose keywords for your website. If you’re using a web hosting provider that uses the cPanel platform, you have an analytics program installed on your server already – Awstats. This program will tell you which keywords your visitors have used to find your website through search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, and this really gives you some valuable insight.

From my traffic logs I can see a lot of things. One thing I notice in particular on this website, is that over the last three or so months I have received thousands of visitors looking for help to remove the line from Word 2007. If I wanted to, I could capitalize on this and create a couple of supplementary pages to compliment these keywords and increase my website’s traffic even more.

However, in this case I don’t see any direct benefits for this as I can’t easily monetize the traffic for this phrase. My point remains, though – that you can look over your website’s traffic logs and see which keywords result in traffic from search engines. If they are “good” keywords, meaning that you can get some benefit out of the traffic that is coming to your website through these search terms, this is an easy way to increase your website’s visitors (targeted visitors) without putting a lot of effort or thought into keyword research.

For better results – track your conversions

Now, conversion tracking deserves a post or two all by itself, but for the sake of brevity here, suffice it to say that if you can track the keywords that convert to paying visitors or subscribers, by all means use these keywords. However, if you do not have the means in place to track visitor conversions and the keywords that they use to find your website – by all means refer to your website’s traffic logs for keywords that you can use to draw more natural traffic from the SERPs.