And more keywords yet...

So far, our house painter has done a pretty good job. His brainstorming has covered all of the basics. He has also thought about updating his web site with new ideas that have come from his SEO activities. How else can he expand upon his list?

He can check out what the competition is doing. When you look at your competitors web sites, feel free to define “competitor” broadly. It can be another local shop just like yours, or it can be a national chain. The idea is to have an understanding about what key words people are using in your industry.

Joe Shmo decides to look up a local competitor’s web site. One way to see what keywords they are using is to look at the Title of the page. He sees that they are using “House Painting, Contractor, Massachusetts” in their tags. He hadn’t thought to mention that he was a contractor, so he puts that on his key word list.

Another way is to look at the meta tags in the source code. To do that in Explorer, go to the top navigational bar and click on View, then scroll down to Source. A notepad will open up with the web site’s source code. If you have never worked in HTML before, it may look a little confusing, but don’t be intimidated. Once you know your way around, it is easy to find what you want. First you will see the HTML tag and then a HEAD tag. Then there will be the TITLE tag. Under that is where the META tags are. Meta tags are one way a web site talks to search engines and to browsers. He sees this tag:
META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="House, Painting, wall paper, wallpapering, painter, painters, boston, massachusetts, ma , Home improvement"

Joe looks at the keywords. He doesn’t actually do wallpapering, so he ignores those. However, he sees the words “Home Improvement”. That is a pretty good keyword so he adds that to his list.

Here is his current key word list:

Home Improvement
Contractor
Nurseries
Nursery Murals
Aged Look Faux Finishes
House Painting
Boston
Specialty Finishes
Specialty Paint Finishes
Faux Painting
Interior Finishes
Textured Finishes
Joe Shmo House Painting
Joe Shmo
Shmo