What can you do if your keywords are too common? Is there anything that can help?

Well, for a start, including misspellings in your meta tag keywords could help you to get visitors who don’t know how to spell or those who type too fast – this traffic is just as good as any other, after all. How many people do you know that use a dictionary when they don’t know how to spell a word? I certainly can’t think of many. Including misspellings will help you to some extent, but it probably will not provide you with a drastic improvement in traffic especially considering that many search engines now have built in spell checkers so that if a user spells a word incorrectly it asks “Did you mean <correct spelling>?” You can use tools like WordTracker to find out which misspellings are the most popular, and target those.

Try to think on the same level as your users, not always like a webmaster. Thinking like the average person will make you more successful – you should constantly remind yourself to think like the average person when you’re trying to pick what words 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 probably come up with the key words that are most important. Think of each group within your 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 increased search engine traffic.

One of the things that will set you apart from the rest of the world is learning the special language of your trade. When you learn about your chosen trade, 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 industry would search for aren’t the same as ones that people inside it would search for – targeting jargon words can help you to get highly-targeted traffic with little competition.

Another thing that will set you apart is using words that someone unfamiliar with your trade would use in an attempt to find content regarding your trade. You can’t target your site only to those who already know a good deal about what you have to offer. Your content probably won’t be fresh to people who are experienced in your field so you are much more dependent on your products at that point. If, however, you are able to target people who know little or nothing about your particular trade, you will be able to generate a good deal of traffic and probably move a sizable amount of inventory.

One last, but very important, method of providing good key word is to discuss the subject of your site with others and observe their reactions to your language. If they seem to suddenly understand what you are saying, that phrase may be a good one for your key words. Talk to your friends, your family, and other web masters about your subject and see what language is generally associated with your subject. This language is generally the correct language to use when generating your key words.

The most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to come up with unique key words is that there are huge groups of people out there who are interested in your goods but have not been targeted by other sites. These markets (known as niche markets) are basically ripe for the picking. If you can come up with a group that would be interested in your product but has not been targeted thoroughly by your competition, you will be able to drastically increase your traffic and/or sales. The ability to identify and target niche markets is an art and it can be developed by any truly dedicated marketer, but you have to be observant and patient in order to come up with valuable niche markets. After all, you are attempting to do what nobody has done before!

As an SEO, you will constantly be fighting with your key words. You will be trying to come up with more interesting or unique key words, and you will be trying to implement them more smoothly into your web page. The fact of the matter is that this takes time and practice. You have to get thoroughly engrossed in the community surrounding your market. Check out some forums relating to your market, look at the common forms of media coverage such as magazines and books. There are possible key words everywhere just waiting to be exploited for the sake of increases in your traffic and sales.

When you're a web designer, there are lots of little programs that you'll gradually accumulate to make your life that little bit easier. When you've spent hours doing something by hand and you're dreading ever having to do it again, it can be a big relief to learn that there's a free program out there that can do it quickly and effectively for you the next time

Colour Programs.

One of the thorniest issues you'll run into as a web designer is colour. Because web colours are all expressed in the somewhat mysterious HTML colour (#000000 to #FFFFFF), it can be hard to get the exact colours you want in your design. Don't be fooled into thinking there aren't many to choose from: those colours are in hexadecimal, meaning that each one of those six numbers can have a value anywhere from 0-F (that is, 0-9, A-F). 16 possible values to the power of 6 makes over 16 million possible colours – that's 24-bit colour, not bad at all.

So, really, instead of trying out millions of colours by hand to see which you like best, it's much better to download an HTML colour picker tool – an essential part of every web designers toolbox. It might sound like they'd be very simple, but there are all sorts of features they can have: suggesting 'complementary colours' to the one you've chosen, for example. Some let you take a picture of your screen and click on parts of it to see which HTML colour is being used – useful when you see a colour somewhere that you think would work great on your website.

My personal favourite colour program is Color Schemer, available at www.colorschemer.com – it has all the features you could really want in an HTML colour picker. If you're after something free, though, you might like to try the more compact Pixie, from www.nattyware.com/pixie.html, which sits in the corner of your screen and tells you the colour code of any colour you hover over.

HTML Checkers.

There's not much competition when it comes to HTML checking: what you really need is the W3C's HTML Tidy, or one of the many programs based on it (see http://tidy.sourceforge.net/). Tidy can clean up truly disastrous HTML, including the kind of thing produced by many of the more popular editor programs like Dreamweaver, and applications like Microsoft Word. Even if you think your code is great, the chances are that Tidy will be able to make it smaller and better.

Mozilla Firefox Extensions.

When you use Firefox as your web browser, you gain access to lots of extensions that you can install quickly and easily. Since so many people using the browser are web designers, there are more extensions available for web development tasks than there are for anything else. This makes Firefox an ideal browser to use when you're writing a website.

Which extensions are most useful? Here's a quick list:

Web Developer's Toolbar (http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/). This is the most useful Firefox extension out there for web designers. Its best feature is that it lets you experiment with CSS styles 'live', so the style of your page changes as you do it – a great way to write CSS.

LinkChecker (http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker/). You absolutely must check your website for broken links, but it's usually quite a chore. Because LinkChecker integrates with the browser, it can check your links for you on-the-fly. It highlights working links in green and broken ones in red. Simple, but very effective.

HTML Validator (http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/). Lets you check whether your pages are valid HTML without having to type all their URLs into an online validity checker. Takes a lot of the pain out of code validation, which makes you more likely to actually bother to do it!

SearchStatus (http://quirk.co.za/searchstatus/). When you're trying to monitor your site's position in search engines, this extension is indispensible. It shows you the Google PageRank and Alexa ranking for your site, giving you an idea of both the link popularity and traffic the site gets. It also lets you check who links to your site, and whether the search engines have added it to their index yet.