How to Create a Highly Effective Keyword List

by Herman Drost

Recently I was asked to optimize a site selling Spanish T-Shirts to attract lots of traffic from the search engines. Without traffic your site won't make any sales. On the other hand getting lots of traffic does not guarantee sales if your web copy is lousy. There are many factors that should be considered when you optimize your web site.

My example site will be Wild Lily Designs (http:⁄⁄www.wildlilydesigns.com) a site that specializes in selling Spanish Shirts.

Here are the steps I took to optimize the site:

1. Create a keyword list

Write down all the keywords related to the topic of your site. Try to also include keyword phrases. ie T-Shirts, Spanish Shirts, Spanish Apparel, Spanish Clothing.

There are probably millions of web sites selling T-Shirts; therefore you need to narrow your focus. This is why Spanish Shirts or Spanish T-Shirts would a better niche because it wouldn't be as competitive. If your niche is too competitive you will have a difficult time getting high rankings. Ideally you want your site to appear on the first page for one of the major search engines... Google, MSN or Yahoo.

2. Find related keywords

These are words that are similar to the main keyword list you created above. You may be able to incorporate them into the content of your site as it grows. Keywords that have a very narrow focus ie Spanish T-Shirts, may not be a popular search term. If I broaden my search to include "Spanish" or "T-Shirt" I will find hundreds of words that relate to these topics.

Use a thesaurus dictionary or thesaurus.com to find similar words besides your main keywords. Another great free tool to brainstorm related keywords is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Here is the list of similar keywords generated when I inserted "spanish shirts" in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

 madrid shirts
 language tee shirts
 spain shirt
 spanish shirt
 shirts in spanish
 spanish shirts
 spanish t shirts
 real madrid shirt
 spanish english dictionary
 spanish apparel
 sign language shirt
 language shirts
 madrid t shirts
 shirt in spanish
 hispanic t shirt
 spain t shirt
 language apparel
 hispanic shirts
 sign language t shirt
 madrid t shirt
 real madrid t shirts
 language t shirts
 sign language shirts
 language shirt
 shirts spanish
 sign language t shirts
 spanish t shirt
 real madrid merchandise
 i love shirts
 hispanic t shirts
 long sleeve shirts
 spain t shirts
 t shirts in spanish
 madrid shirt

From this list you get both the singular and plural forms of the keywords. You may also want to include Madrid shirts, madrid t-shirt, spanish shirts.

To find out how often people are searching on these keywords you need to use keyword tools. I use a combination of both free and paid tools.

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