Keyword Selection

Choosing Your Keywords

Deciding on the right keywords or keyword phrases for your site is a critical step in SEO. Single keywords are often too general to attract the traffic you want and are usually highly competitive. Start your keyword selection by thinking of all the keyword phrases of two or three words that apply to your site and would likely be used by people searching the net for your product, service or web site content.

Keyword Research - Finding your "Niche" Words

How can you discover what keywords are popular in your field? It's perfectly ethical to check out your competitors at this point - and look at the keywords they are using in their site title, meta tags, and page text. Don't steal their copy or meta tags - but do make a list of search terms that seem to work well.

Try out your list of keyword combinations by searching for them yourself in popular search engines like Google or Yahoo. If the competition for the search terms you want is very heavy, try more specific phrases. The term "web hosting", for instance, returns over 4 million results on Google, with "cheap web hosting" still very popular, returning 835,000 pages. But "cheap web hosting in Detroit" narrows the field to 33,500 and appeals to a niche market area. Other variations might include "cheap webhosting" with 118,000 results, or "cheap shared webhosting" with 22,000 competitors.

Optimize for no more than three keyword phrases on a page; any more, and you dilute the effect of your work. In the example "cheap shared webhosting", it's possible to optimize for "cheap webhosting", "shared webhosting," and the original three word combination.

Online Keyword Selection Tools

We recommend using the free keyword selection tool at WordTracker. Wordtracker compiles a database of search terms - you enter some keywords, and you'll learn how often people search for them, and how many competing sites use those keywords. WordTracker's free trial, which you can use as often as you wish, includes KEI - a mathematical formula that compares competing sites to search terms; the higher the KEI number, the better chance you have of gaining significant traffic from that search term.

Once you have selected your keywords, it's time to put them to use. Find out how to incorporate your keywords into your web site in our copy writing article and then continue your search engine optimization by learning how to use keywords in titles, meta tags, alt tags and anchor text.