Staff Reporter | 26 Jun, 2008
With increasing competition between Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for a market share, keyword marketing has emerged as a very important tool to connect with consumers who may be interested in one's products.

"Keyword marketing is a very important tool to connect with consumers who may be interested in your products," says Sandeep Shrivastava, Director (Search), Yahoo! India in an exclusive interview to SME Times.

"Organizations like Yahoo! work with enterprises to create a custom program for brand promotion and generation of trials/sales," Shrivastava adds.

The purpose of keyword marketing is helping one to define keywords and phrases bringing to one's site as many target visitors as possible.

"Some SMEs think they have what they feel is a successful website. It's large, has plenty of good, relevant content and was designed in a way to help most users visiting the site. It is also listed in most of the major search engines. But after a couple of days they question us, where are the visitors?" says Amrit Rajkhewa a webmaster with a web-designing firm in Delhi's Nehru Place area.

"We have a couple of SMEs who had made their own company website so as to get inquiries from buyers overseas. They come to us saying that they are not getting enough page-views, leave alone getting inquiries. When we saw the websites we found the missing link. We found that many websites and web pages fail in the search engine ranking race simply because of bad keyword or key phrase optimization, Rajkhewa says."

He goes on to say that in many cases SMEs are not aware of the importance of keywords. They make the website and later when they find that the site is not generating any inquiries they start blaming the firm who had designed the site. At many times although the keywords are correct some of the keywords used daily by the searchers have changed over a period of time. They need to understand that regularly updating the keywords work for their own benefit and the benefit of their businesses, he adds.

Harish Kumar a MCA passout from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, who works on projects for small to medium companies on freelance basis says, "The problem doesn't end here. Certain clients are not cooperative and are adamant of using certain keywords which are not popular enough. At most times I put my foot down, but in many cases where I cave in to the customers' demands, it ends in loss of money. They refuse to pay my dues saying that I had not done enough to get him inquiries."

Today webmasters opine that keyword marketing is not necessarily just the basic sketch of what the website may need, but also is also about a host of other factors. This may include keywords keeping in mind the location, business or trade the website may be pursuing, the target visitors and the specific and potentially positive visitors of the site.

Good traffic to the website may not necessarily mean a boost to the economic profits of one's business online. Not using the right keywords may lead to attracting a traffic that is of no use or junk. Hence a thorough research before a keyword marketing campaign is of utmost importance.

"For enterprises, it is very important to clearly identify the objectives that they want to achieve from keyword marketing. Since the premise of keyword marketing is connecting with the consumer who has a specific intent, understanding of the keywords that are related to your products is very important," Sandeep Shrivastava adds.