broadening keyword scope to raise visibility

[Amicro]

Hi All,

Over the past few days I've had a question just burning a hole in my mental pocket. That question is how exactly one might broaden the scope of keywords for a site to raise its overall visibility?

Since the Florida algo hit many of our sites have all but vanished unless of course your search terms are very narrow and focused. As I understand it this "was" the aim and purpose of this new algo. In essence they've leveled the playing field in some regards, and offer the user the ability to retrieve much more relevant results from their query.

Mind you...I'm not talking about spamming the spider here. I merely want to raise the visibility of our sites, keeping it relevant but much easier to find us.

Sorry if this has been previously discussed. I did a cursory search for this here and didn't find anything that really addressed my question.

thanks,

[mona]

Amicro, you bring up a great subject. Check out what Mike_Mackin wrote in this thread, Getting in the surfers shoes [webmasterworld.com]. It's an oldie - it may just be the original thread on this topic. But it still applies today. I've used Mike's ideas and they worked very well in bringing in traffic, but I think I need to work more on how to convert that traffic into sales.

[Amicro]

Ok...this might seem like a very ignorant question, but I've had my head stuffed in so many lines of code lately that I've got to ask this. Exactly where and how does someone go mining for keywords? I've been wondering that for a little while now. How do folks find out just how many times a particular KW has been searched on?

[mona]

Amicro, it's not an ignorant question. However, there are many threads floating around here about keyword tools [google.com].

I use Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions (sorry,can't make the link work for some reason)
Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool [inventory.overture.com] and I also like to use the
Vivisimo Clustering Engine [vivisimo.com].