No, it wasn't a typo.

In the battle for search engine rankings, the keywords meta-tag still plays an important role.

What are keywords and keyphrases?

But keywords don't just exist in meta-tags. Every word on your page should be considered as a keyword. Strung together these words make keyphrases. The more keyphrases that are relevant to your subject in your body text and page titles, the more traffic you'll probably get from search engines. When crafting your body text, think about how people would search for your given subject and incorporate those statements.

To make things more challenging on the search engine arena, a number of major engines now allow you to "buy" keywords.

Paid keyword strategies

Generally, it works like this...

You decide on the categories and the search terms that are relevant to the content of your website(s). You then determine how much you want to bid on a cost per click (or per view) basis for each of the categories and search terms you chose. The higher you bid the higher your web site will appear in the search results on the categories and search terms you selected. These "pay-per-click" and "pay-per-view" options usually come above the free listings, or in the case of Google, a couple at the top and others on the right hand side. 

There's several variations regarding pay-for-placement on search engines, but these advertising solutions are among the most common. Also common is the pay-per-page URL submission, but in this instance your battle for rankings is down to how well optimized your web pages are. You pay to submit your URL's and then duke it out with other sites for top ranking. Search engine optimization is becoming more crucial in succeeding in Internet business, if you haven't examined this part of your ebusiness yet, it's definitely time you did!

Throwing money at search engines for paid placement is all well and good for the multi-nationals with mega-budgets for advertising, but for the rest of us, we need to be more creative in finding strategies to increase web site traffic ...

A keyword strategy with a twist

Back to the misspelled keywords strategy....

How about this approach? Literacy levels are dropping in our society. People's ability to spell is worsening. Their spelling does not improve when they use a search engine. You can probably pick up extra visitors on your site by including misspelled words in your Keywords statement. You can also apply this to your body text, although it's not advisable as it can decrease the credibility of your content. It may be better to place these misspelt keywords and phrases in your image "alt" tags.

As an example, below is a list of "alternative" spellings I have observed for the word "training". These were located using a tool for querying search engines for keyword popularity.

trainning
traning
tranning
trayning

We've actually tried this strategy on one of our sites with surprisingly positive results!

If you decide to utilize "pay" search engine options, by bidding on common misspelling variations on popular terms, you'll save yourself a lot of money in advertising fees and have less competition. You may not get as many clickthroughs, but the conversion rate between view and clickthrough will be a lot higher, therefore making your COA (cost of acquisition) per client or visitor a great deal less.

Spamming keywords will penalize your search engine rankings!

A word of warning - never use this body content strategy or your keywords meta-tag statement to misrepresent content on your site. The adult industry abused the strategy for years and search engine spiders are pretty good at detecting abuse of keywords statements. It was thanks the adult industry that the keywords meta-tag lost a great deal of importance in search engine page rank calculation algorithms. Also, be careful not to repeat key phrases and words too many times within a document, otherwise your page rankings may be penalized for "spamming".

In case you haven't noticed, I've used the keyword spelling strategy (legitimately) in this article ;0)

Further learning resources:

-View our Search Engine Optimization tutorials index

-Learn more about pay-per-click and pay-per-view

-Buying web site traffic

-General Webmaster and Internet Marketing tutorials
 

Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content and tools, software and community.
Web Marketing, eCommerce & Development solutions. 

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