I have a web site at www.fu-lu-shou.com which is a rather niche web
site in Chinese-English about U.S. stocks and options. Putting common
keywords like stock trading, options etc fail to get a good
click-through rate. I would pay for someone who can give me keywords
that give a good click through rate

Hi Khean

I had a quick look at your site to begin with to give me some ideas
and it occurred that this is a very interesting "reverse research"
question since we need to find the keywords that we would use to find
your site.

Simple Searches
***************
Therefore I performed a very simple search on google to begin with by
entering "Stocks Keywords". From this search I selected an E-zine list
which helpfully included keywords used for various other similar
businesses.

Some of the Keywords found here are: Investments, Markets, funds,
equities, money, finance, portfolio, wall street, investing,
financial, stockmarket, business, economy,  options, commodities,
futures, trading, etc.

There is a page full of similar terms on the page. My personal
favourites, which I felt were most suited to your needs were "Markets,
Wall Street, portfolio, investing"

E-zine List
http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/keywords/stocks.html

Further down the list of hits for "Stocks Keywords" I found another
useful list
which included more terms. 

investing, online, market, trading, investors, investor, business,
finance, economic, analysis

Complete Planet
http://www.completeplanet.com/Business/Investing_Investments/Stocks_Bonds/index.asp

I did try using some of the keywords, for further searches, i.e.
"Investment Keywords", "Markets Keywords", but it became much like a
thesaurus in that the same keywords were printed up.

Your Website
************
I then looked back at your website and noted some of the terminology
in the text. Some of these words, I felt would be ideal keywords and
obviously the odder the words or combination of words, the more potent
the search.

For example if I search simply "Investments" in Google, I get
6,410,000 hits.
However, If I search "Investments Bear" I am down to 530,000 hits. Add
"Wall Street" and I am down to 71000 hits. If I searched 3 common
words like "Market Investments Money" Then my hits are still in the
millions.

Therefore, I looked at your web site to find the main areas of
relevance and tried to predict what people might type if they were
looking speculatively for a company of this type and compared this
with the used Keywords from the Initial searches in the first part of
this answer.

Summary
*******
The most relevant Keywords for your site in my opinion would be, 

Standard
"Wall Street, Portfolio, Investing, Spread, Money, Futures,
Investment, analysis, U.S., Opportunity, Investors, Capital, Buying,
Selling"

Special
"Bull, Bear, Profit, Price, Trends, Experts, Advice"


Additional Links
****************
You may also find these sites interesting as they deal with the issue
of popular keywords in the fields we are talking about.

Link Spider
http://www.linkspider.co.uk/map/investing/

This one is very interesting as it reports on the dollar value of
keywords

Hit Brain
http://www.hitbrain.com/kdv101.html

As you will note, I have selected the link for a page which is mid
search because the keyword "money" lies at the 108 place and is the
176 most popular keyword. If you look through this site there are many
options to look through over various search engines to establish the
value and click through rates of the most popular 2000 words.


I hope this helps.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by khean-ga on 17 Nov 2002 18:02 PST

Hi Johnny,

Thanks for a good effort in 'reverse research' of keywords. However, I
think the ultimate test of good keywords is if my site turns up in the
search using those keywords. Don't need to be in the top 3 position,
but top 10-15 position. The target audience of my site are (1)Chinese
people all over the world (2) interested in U.S. stocks and options
(options is important feature of my site)3)These Chinese can read
English but feel more comfortable reading stock analysis in Chinese.
Can you find keywords that turn up my site in a Google search? I'll
double the rate to $20 if you can show me such keywords.

---

Clarification of Answer by johnny_phoenix-ga on 18 Nov 2002 01:51 PST

I have tried literally hundreds of different combinations of keywords
to try and find your site manually. After spending an hour doing so, I
then hit myself repeatedly for overlooking a basic fact.

Your web site's natural state is mainly made up of chinese special
characters and you have to choose english from the column of options
on the side to translate the site.

Therefore, if you are searching using english keywords, it is unlikely
to pick up your site since the keywords will not match up with
untranslated text on your site.

Therefore in order for the keywords to work, you would need to put
words on your site to find.

For example, if I was looking for the poem that begins "I wandered
lonely as a cloud", It wouldn't matter if you had the poem repeatedly
on your site in French, Italian and German if you didn't also have it
in English. Once you put the phrase on your site in english, the
keywords used in the search would be able to match up.

Therefore, If you are looking for english speaking Chinese people to
find your site, you may be as well to put an already translated
English page on your site.

The keywords would then have something to find and would be able to
pick up your site easier thus in principle, you should have a better
click through rate.

The problem is best highlighted by showing you the only successful hit
of your site I was able to get from actually typing the web site
itself in.

Google Search 
://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=G&q=%22%2Bwww.fu-lu-shou.%2Bcom/%22

The question is therefore moving away from the best keywords, to a
more technical question about web spiders and how they work, detecting
chinese or indeed other special characters.

Does this help?

Please do not hesitate to contact for a further clarification if this
does not answer your question.

The outcome of Johnny-Phoenix's research is very useful for me. He has
identified the problem for me and I will be able to rectify the
problem. Thanks Johnny-Phoenix.

Thank you very much, I am glad I could help.