Good Keyword Optimization

The most important thing you can do for your business and
your website is develop relevant keywords that are not too
competitive yet generate targeted traffic to your website.
It's called keyword optimization.

Why is it important?

Because Keywords and keyword phrases do a couple
of things for you:

- With the right keywords, you will attract the viewers
most interested in the items or services on your site.

- You will rank higher in the search engines for your chosen
keywords, saving you thousands of dollars in advertising.
It all starts, however, with the best keywords that pertain
to your product or services.

When selecting keywords you should select 1 perhaps 2 of the
most relevant keywords for each page of your site. I suggest
using no more than two keywords per page, preferably one.

Why?

Because search engines strive to deliver the most relevant
pages for the search term entered. The more focused your
page is for the search term, the more relevant the search
engines will find your page. The more keywords you use,
the less focused your page becomes.

How do you find keywords that your target audience will use?

- Think like your readers. Take yourself outside your site for
a minute and think about how you would find the products
or services you are selling.

- Use Overture's Keyword Selector Tool
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Type in your most basic keyword and it will show you the
variations of the search term and also the count of how many
times that term was entered in the search engine.

- Think of phrases as opposed to one single word. If you sell clay
pots, think of keywords such as painted clay pots, or clay flower
pots, large clay pots, buy clay pots. Use descriptive words when
brainstorming phrases.

- Ask your relatives, kids and friends what they would type in
to find your products. You would be amazed at the great ideas
that can be generated. For example, I asked a teenager once
what he would type in to find shoes online and he said 'nice kicks'.
As of this writing, Overture's keyword selector tool showed a
count of 12130. Hmmm, never would have thought of it on my own.

- Use a thesaurus or Webster’s dictionary to find similar words
to your chosen keywords. Consider all forms of the word.
For example, for the term supply there is supply, supplies,
supplier, supplying. Thinking of all forms of the word help a
great deal in brainstorming keyword ideas.

- If you have a website already, place a search engine on your site.
This would be a search engine that you put on your site that
searches only your site such ashttp://www.freefind.com/ .
This will help you collect data on what keywords users are typing
in. Once you've collected a good list of search terms you can use
this to help you determine the best keywords.

Along this same line, you can also use your website server logs
to gather information on the keywords used to find yoursite.
Once you've made a list of the best keywords and keyword
phrases, you will need to determine which ones are the best.

Your challenge is to find keywords that have a high usage count
but appear on the least amount of competing web pages.
Wordtracker.com is an excellent tool for helping you achieve this.
Wordtracker's 'Keyword Effectiveness Index' (KEI) will provide
you with the number of times a keyword is used along with the
number of competing web pages. The higher the KEI, the more
popular yourkeywords are, and the less competition. This means
a better chance for you in getting to the top of the search engines.

Finding the best keywords and keyword phrases is an important
part of your marketing mix. Find the correct keywords and build
your content around them.