Please bear with me if this has been answered ad nauseum before, but either I can't find it or I don't understand what I'm looking at. I need to ask a few questions about keywords.

(Yes, I built my we site before I had a single clue about keywords. So I might have to totally scrap it and re-work it. Oh well - why do I _always_ have time to do it over?? *sigh*)

My main thrust at the moment is birthday parties (but I do intend to branch out soon into a few other "categories"). I do own three different domain names: FamilyFunMagic, YumaMagic, and YumaBirthdayMagic. I do know that Google has a keyword tool, and I'm also looking at something called "Market Samurai".

I can think of quite a list of keywords. And they're probably pretty much the same as every other birthday party magician out there! Except for "Yuma", which (as far as I know) is only duplicated in Colorado. So I assume Google has some way of knowing that a searcher is in Yuma, Arizona, and won't show results from Phoenix or Colorado?

How many different variations do you use? "Kid", "kids", "kid's", "child", "children", etc etc??

How specific and detailed do I need to be? "Birthday party" will get a broad range of hits, but they might not be looking for a magician. "Birthday party magician" is more likely get someone with an open wallet - but how many searchers are looking for a magician? So I need to determine which keywords are used in my area to find services that loosely include me, and which will narrow the field to exactly me, and which are most likely to actually get someone over to me, yes? "That store is in the downtown mall next to Burger King" may get someone who's just browsing into the area more so than "11532 E. Main Mall Road" - but the second might be better for someone who knows exactly what they're looking for and wants a direct target. Since I need to be available to both groups, it sounds like a juggling act.

If I've got it right, the main keywords need to be in my titles, and a few more can be in my page descriptions, and all of them should be used liberally and logically in my page content, yes?

If anyone can make sense of all thins and help me make sense of keywords, I'd greatly appreciate any help!

Ed

You don't want more than 20 keywords. You want those keyword throughout title, description, text body, and also name the images using a keyword.

This is a broad topic and you will get different people who tell you different things. If I were you I would go to the bookstore and find a book on seo and keywords.

What software are you using for your website? I use software that analyzes my site before I publish it and then tells me what to do stwp by step to optimize it for search engines. This has been very helpful.

Hi, Jonathan. I put my website together using Notepad and HTML - did it myself, and boy! does it look like it!!

I've been reading just about everything I can from the library and on the internet on SEO and trying to fumble through Google's keyword tool, Market Samurai's program, and AdWords explanations.

Seems like there's just a few key thoughts that are missing from my understanding. I'll concentrate on my birthday site first.

My key words are going to be the same as every other birthday magician. So I've got to assume that Google is going to pick up somehow where the searcher is geographically and show them local results first unless they've specified a different location. So my city name might not have to be one of my top-crust key words??

One item I have read a lot is: think like a searcher. My business may have its own jargon words, but these are not necessarily the words someone will type into the search engine. But once you start going down that road - well, now I understand why magicians have those huge blocks of background-colored text that name every single city in their area and every type of performance they do!

I can see a parent sitting down at the computer for three reasons:
-- They're out of fresh ideas to make this party different than the last one. So they're not searching for a magician or magic show; they're searching for ideas, themes, _something_!! I want to be one of the ideas they run across.
-- The child wants a certain theme and the parent is trying to find the stuff they need to throw the party. In that case, the parent could just gloss over anything about a magician because that's not what they're looking for.
-- They heard about me from a friend, their child, a public show, etc., and they want to find the magician in Yuma who did the kung fu and spaghetti tricks and something with a chicken. And I'd better be there!

That's a lot of key word combinations! Do you try to stuff them all into one web page? Or would that be three different pages, each optimized for one of the three scenarios? And do you have to make all the different combinations of words yourself? Or does the search engine try the various combinations and variations automatically? (For example: magic - chicken - kung fu - spaghetti ... leaving out the "kung fu", you get a lot of recipies!)

Ed

I'm just throwing this out there... Wordpress is the bomb!

If you have a blog (have I mentioned wordpress?) you can write articles on each topic you like. New content tends to make google happy...

Fitz

Yep - got a blog, and got a FB page. Just getting started though, and not a lot happening to write about. And if I concentrate on the blog, then when do I ever learn about how to implement keywords?

Ed

Everything you do is about Keywords...

the keywords dictate the content.. what you write.. how you write and so on..

Blogging lets you use the keywords MORE and on more pages which gives you the ability to link one page to another to give it more value (easy in wordpress you can use a plugin to do it)

ALL fairly simple to do