How To Target Traffic Online

Do you know what your target audience wants and how they are searching online? As an Internet Marketing Specialist I often find that many website owners do not know who their target market is or how to target them.

Keywords are the words that consumers enter in search engines to find websites about their interests. If you want to get in front of potential consumers, it is important that your website has good search engine rankings for the keywords that are related to your services or products.

Knowing what your target audience wants and how they are looking online is crucial to your online success. Optimizing your web pages for keywords that no one uses is pointless. In addition, in order to get targeted visitors, the keywords must not be too broad. Your content and metatags should also support the keyword phrases your market uses. Then once they have reached your site the content should be appealing as well.

The Right Keywords

The first step in successful SEO copywriting is choosing the right keywords to make them very specific to your market. You can survey your target market for their keyword usage or use more thorough keyword research tools. When conducting the keyword research and analysis:

1) use keyword phrases containing two to four words
2) be specific - geographically, topically, or by product
3) only use the keywords that are important to your web business
4) avoid very competitive keywords or general keyword phrases

Use focused and targeted keyword phrases that are common enough so the web searcher will use them, but selective enough that they don't return millions of matches. Most consumers use a two to four word phrase when they search online, so phrasing is very important. For example, if you are a real estate agent in Nashville, you would not target the key phrase "real estate agent" or "Realtor", instead use something more specific like "Nashville Real Estate Agent". Very specific keywords generate targeted traffic that are more likely to increase your sales.

The Wrong Keywords

Single words cannot promote ranking or sell effectively, for example you would not want to target just "real estate" as an agent. Avoid the most popular keyword phrases or general keyword phrases because you'll be competing with millions of other web pages for a search engine ranking.

It's unrealistic to think that a new web site could rank number one with a popular phrase like "Marketing". You are better to target "Internet marketing strategies". More established companies who have been on the Internet for several years will have the advantage of link popularity and a high Pagerank and therefore better rankings in the search results for these broader or general keyword phrases.

Working With Search Engines

Another important factor to help drive the targeted traffic to your site is optimizing the site using metatags. Metatags, often overlooked and misunderstood, are elements of HTML coding on a website. Search engines use these metatags to help them determine what the site is about and assist with indexing a website. Most metatags are included within the 'header' code of a website. The most important tags are the title tag, description tag and the keywords tag. Different search engines have different rules about how these tags are used and how many characters they should contain. To make good use of your metatags use your targeted keywords that you found during your keyword research and analysis in the site copy and in the metatags.

By reviewing or crawling your website content and metatags, search engines will find out what your web site is about. As soon as search engines consider your web site relevant to the topic or search, the easier it is to get high rankings for your keywords and key phrases.

Megan Faust is an Internet Marketing Specialist & the Founder of Virtu-Assist. Internet Marketing includes keyword research and analysis, search engine optimization (SEO), creating compelling web content, and producing online marketing strategies. Contact me to learn more about how our Internet marketing strategies can boost your web presence.