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One of the most effective (and free) methods of marketing your online store is to target keywords in your store’s pages. We have previously discussed the techniques for putting your keywords to use, such as optimizing your online store, choosing effective categories, and optimizing your category and product pages.

What makes these techniques work, though, is to choose the right keywords that will bring in customers who buy. The term “keyword” is a bit misleading. Normally, effective keywords are not single words, but are normally 2 – 4 word phrases. Here are some tips for deciding which to use:

1. Use short phrases instead of single words. 1-word keywords are too broad and competitive. For example, if you sell jewelry and choose “jewelry” as your keyword, you are competing against 261,000,000 other web sites that are returned by Google when someone searches for “jewelry.” If you use “men’s jewelry”, only 3,100,000 pages are returned. That is a reduction of nearly 99% in competition.
2. Choose phrases that are specific, but not too specific. The goal is to have keywords targeted that will land you on the top pages of search engine results and are actually used by real people. To continue the above jewelry example, choosing “jewelry” returned 261,000,000 results in Google. Modifying that to “men’s gold bracelets” returns 674,000, which is reasonable since not too many websites are returned and people might reasonably search for that. However, if you targeted “men’s gold and ruby bracelets in minneapolis minnesota”, you would have a great chance to be on the first page, since only 4,940 websites are returned, but extremely few (if any) people would reasonably search using that phrase. The value to your online store is the same if you’re #1 on for a keyword phrase nobody uses as it is if you’re #4,000 for a broad keyword that everyone targets. Exactly $0.
3. Use your search engine log as a guide. One of the best ways to know which keywords to target is to see what people have already used to find you. If your use Webplus Shop for your shopping cart software, a short search engine log is shown on your Merchant Dashboard page at the bottom, showing you the top 15 keyword phrases used in the last 60 days, along with the number of times that phrase is used. To use this report most effectively, you should do searches yourself using those top 15 keywords in various search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live Search. Write down which position your online business comes up in the results for each keyword phrase. You will probably find that you are not on the top page. If that’s the case, you should use the optimization techniques listed at the beginning of this article to increase your ranking with those words.
4. Research your competitors’ keywords. Going to competing websites and looking at their meta-tags can give you some good ideas for keywords. To see their meta-tags, right-click on their web page and choose “View Source.” Then press CTRL-F to bring up a mini-search box. Enter “<meta” (without the quotes) to have it highlight the meta tags. Also note the keywords your competitors use in their title bar (shown in the <title> tag in the “View Source” window).
5. Analyze your keywords using keyword tools. A couple of the most popular keyword tools include Keyword Discovery and WordTracker,  both of which are not free. Popular free tools include Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Trends. These tools will show you how often keywords are searched, indicating how popular they are.

Optimizing your store to target effective keywords is by far the best free method of increasing the number of customers visiting and buying. It costs you nothing except some time and the payoff can start within a week and will last for years. Every week or two, you should re-evaluate your search engine rankings and they keywords you targeted, along with your traffic and sales. This will help maintain and increase your SEO marketing efforts and your sales.