Selecting keywords for your infertility / reproductive / IVF Web site

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Selecting Keywords for Your Infertility Web Site

Before you submit your Web pages to search engines, it is important to select the appropriate keywords for your infertility Web site. This Web page discusses the following major topics:

Use keyword combinations
Research keywords to determine popular keyword combinations
Additional information and tools

Use Keyword Combinations

Due to the sheer volume of infertility information, it is almost impossible to get listed near the top of the search engine rankings when a person queries on the word "infertility." For example, on April 10, 2001, a search on "infertility" produced the following number of Web pages in the most popular search engines.

Alta Vista - 292,505 pages
AOL Search - 2,019 pages
Excite - 26,900 pages
Google - 613,000 pages
HotBot - 635,900 pages
Lycos - 564,388 pages
Northern Light - 248,992 pages
Web Crawler - 26,900 pages

A more effective strategy is to try to rank high for combinations of keywords, called keyword combinations. For example, if you operated a fertility clinic in New York, you might try to rank high for the following phrases:

IVF New York
ICSI New York
infertility New York
infertility clinic New York

Research Keywords to Determine Popular Keyword Combinations

As part of your effort to define the keywords for your Web pages, you will get higher search engine rankings if you use popular, rather than unpopular keywords. The more a particular keyword or keyword combination is entered into a search engine, the more popular that keyword of keyword combination.

However, it's not enough to merely define keyword combinations. Ideally, you'll use popular keyword combinations, which people actually enter into search engines. Review the Tools to Help Promote Your Web Site page for tools to help you access the most popular keywords. In particular the "GoTo.com Suggestion Tool" and "Wordtracker" are helpful.

Here's an example of how to use the keyword popularity tools. Suppose you had a page devoted to infertility medication. You might use the words "infertility medication" as your main keywords on the page. However, how much do people search on "infertility medication?" Well here are the number of queries for "infertility medication" and related keywords for the month of April 2001 (in order of most popular to least popular):

fertility drug - 2997 queries
infertility drug - 942 queries
fertility medication - 179 queries
infertility medication - 151 queries

So, the results show that if you had emphasized only the keywords of "infertility medication," your search engine rankings might suffer. The results show that you should consider using the relatively popular keywords of "fertility drug" or "infertility drug" on your page.

Additional Information and Tools

Additional search engine information
Tools to Help Promote Your Web Site - some of the tools listed can help you select the best keywords for your site.