When starting search engine marketing there are a number of important things to focus on. But one of the most neglected elements of good SEO is choosing your keywords wisely. You can use all the right formatting, put your keywords in all the right places, and still suffer if your site doesn’t use the keywords that bring in traffic. If you are wondering what exactly qualifies as a keyword, it is any combination of one or more words, in a specific order, that describe your site. It is important that keywords be accurate, because all the traffic in the world won’t benefit your site if they aren’t looking for your content. Spam just wastes everyone’s time, and your bandwidth, so don’t bother.
So how do you choose keywords? You want terms that will receive a large number of queries on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other popular search engines. If your terms aren’t being searched for, having your site index relatively high on search engine pages isn’t going to improve your traffic. Unfortunately the widespread usage of SEO has also crowded certain popular keywords, so you are looking for a keyword that is both popular and relatively unsaturated with established competitors. This can be difficult to find without help, so its important to know what tools you can use.
Google is a great resource for SEO in general, and as usual they have a tool that helps while brainstorming terms. All you have to do is input a search term and they will provide you with other popular search terms, allowing you to take one keyword and quickly expand to having several. As a rule it is good to have numerous keywords, since your customers will be coming to your site from different places and for different reasons. Make sure you are thinking of numerous different ways to describe your site, as customers will likely search with lots of different keywords.
Once you have keywords mapped out, you should also run them through a third party keyword tool. Some examples can be found here, here, and here. These usually give you traffic information about each keyword, allowing you to identify the most popular search terms, and therefore helping you choose which terms to emphasize. From here you should check the saturation of each keyword, do a Google search of the word and see how many responses you get, and more importantly, how many of them use the term specifically. Now you have to make a choice, you want to pick out a few keywords, 2-3, that will focus the most on. You might want to choose slightly less popular keywords if they are less saturated with content, because it means you will need to do less to make it to the top of those Google searches. Be careful, as unpopular search terms won’t likely bring in traffic. On the other had, if you cannot get on at least the first 3-5 pages of a search engine, you won’t benefit much either. Each decision is based entirely on the context of the keyword.
Now that you know how to get started, its time to find your keywords!

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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