by Paul Duxbury, 4/8/2007

What can you do if your keywords are too common? Is there anything that can help you optimise your keywords to gain more traffic to your website?

To start with try including misspellings in your meta tag keywords as this can help you to get visitors who don't know how to spell or those, like me, who type too fast. This type of traffic is just as good as any other. How many people do you know that use a dictionary when they don't know how to spell a word? I know I don't and I certainly can't think of many people I know who would do. Whilst including misspellings will help you to some extent, it probably will not provide you with a massive increase in traffic especially now that many search engines have built in spell checkers so that if a user spells a word incorrectly they are presented with the probable correct spelling. If you want to try this then you can take advantage of tools like WordTracker to find out which misspellings are the most popular, and target those.

You should try to think on the same level as your visitors and not always like a webmaster. Thinking like the average person will make you more successful. You really should constantly remind yourself to think like the average person when you're trying to pick the words or phrases which people will use to find you. If you can get into the mind set of a lay person and think "What would I type into the search box if I was looking for the content on this web page?" You will then probably come up with the keywords that are most important. Think of each group within your niche or audience and try to come up with realistic search queries. Entering each word from these queries into your meta tags should help you substantially in terms of increasing your search engine traffic.

If the niche you operate in has a "trade" language then one of the things that will set you apart from the rest of the world is learning the special language of your niche. When you learn about your chosen niche, you start using acronyms and other words that would be foreign to most people, but mean something to the people who would be searching for you. Words that people outside your niche would search for are not the same as those that people inside it would search for. By targeting these jargon words you will be helping yourself to get much more highly-targeted traffic and with the added advantage of potentially little competition.