One of the most important aspects of ranking highly on a search engine is whether a Web site provides a content rich experience for visitors (both human and and search engine spiders.) The following article explains some steps you can take to ensure that your Web site content encourages high search engine rankings.

Discovering your keyword phrases

Discovering appropriate 'keyword phrases' appropriate to the subject matter covered by your Web site is critical for search engine ranking success. If your site does not contain the phrases that people are using to discover the sort of information found on your site, then your site may not appear in the search engine results.

Finding the keyword phrases for your pages and site

The first task is to brainstorm your business and come up with a rough list of possible phrases and keywords. Add these phrases to a spreadsheet.
One of Google Labs' tools is known as Google Sets. The tool creates sets of things based on a few examples. For example, if you entered the terms: graphic design, web design and marketing, and press the button for small set, you would get the following items: graphic design, marketing, web design, advertising, photography, web development, public relations, multimedia, web hosting, flash, logo design, design, website design, printing and ecommerce. The tool gives you the option to 'grow' the list to find additional items. After using Google Sets, add appropriate additional phrases to the spreadsheet.
Another potentially search engine script tool is KwMap. The tool is designed to help you find new keyword phrases and, according to the Web site, it does this by using a database of keyword inter-relations. To use the tool, you enter a keyword phrase and KwMap will display a keyword chart. It contains two lists. One contains your initial keyword phrase, the other contains phrases that are different, but similar. Potentially useful keyword phrases should be added to the spreadsheet.
Google AdWords provides another keyword tool. The tool has two options for generating keyword phrases. The first lets you enter several keyword phrases, for example, you could use the ones that you discovered in step 1 above. The second lets you enter a URL for a Web site. On selecting 'use synonyms' and pressing the 'get keyword ideas' button, the system then creates a list of keywords and keyword phrases. Once you have generated a new list of words, copy and paste them into the spreadsheet.
Do competitive research by analyzing competitive Web sites to see what keyword phrases they are using in their META tags and title tags. These tags are part of the HTML for a page and can be found by opening a competitor site in a browser and clicking View-Page Source in Firefox or View-Source in Explorer. The title and META tags should be close to the top of the page. Add any new keyword phrases to the spreadsheet list.
Wordtracker provides a keyword service, available by subscription, to enable you to get some insight into what people are searching for. According to Wordtracker's Web site, they compile a database from the Dogpile and MetaCrawler meta engines. You can research additional appropriate keywords and import your lists to find how many searches are being made for the specific phrases. The tool can automatically add plural forms of words and add additional terms to keyword phrases. Wordtracker tells you the number of searches for a specific phrase. While this information is useful, if a search term is searched for frequently but is very competitive (i.e. there are a lot of Web sites that show up in the search results when this phrase is searched), then you are less likely to rank well for that phrase. In addition to reporting the number of searches, Wordtracker also provides data on the number of searches divided by the number of sites that appear in search results for the term. The higher this number, the more likely you are to rank well for the phrase.