Which Keywords are right for my site?

The answer to this question obviously differs depending on the focus of your site. You would not denote a keyword such as Barbie Doll if you sell Plumbing supplies. So the relevance of your keywords is very important. Something else to consider is your audience and what they may be searching on to find a service such as the one you offer. Your keywords and phrases should reflect what your audience is most likely to use when looking for a site such as yours.

But this does not tell me how to find keywords which are right for me. How do I ensure my chosen keywords are powerful enough?

The answer to this question lies partly within yourself and partly within the realm of the internet. Only you can know your business in and out, up and down. Realizing this, you should be able to formulate a long list of words people may use when trying to find your site. Not every keyword you think of will be effective though. To get an idea of which keywords are more powerful than others, there is a great Free utility offered by Goto.com. Goto offers a form where you can enter a keyword or phrase and it will report back how many times that word or phrase was searched on in the last month. This utility only covers those searches done at Goto.com, however from these results we can formulate a basic idea of which words are more popular than others.

Some things to consider:

	Ensure the keywords accurately describe what your business is all about.
	Ensure the keywords are placed appropriately within the contents of your website.
	Study your keywords or phrases to find out if people are even searching on such terms, and how often.
	Evaluate your competition and their use of keywords in order to learn why they rank higher than you. (*Note: This is not always obvious as some sites use cloaking scripts or doorway pages which hide their SEO techniques.)
	Expect to tweak and fine-tune your chosen words and their placement within the content of your document as you analyze your rankings.

Now that we understand what keywords are, lets discuss the importance of optimizing our Page Titles. Next Section >