Keywords Are Critical

For search engines, keywords rule … If you want your business website to rank high with the search engines, it is imperative that you give some serious thought to the keywords and phrases that you want to build your website around.

A critical step in natural search engine optimization is to select the right
keywords for your business, products/services (including descriptive
words), and your target market. Understand who you are targeting and
build your search engine optimization efforts around your audience.
Keywords are the terms and phrases that your target market uses
when searching for the products and services you sell in the major search
engines and directories. Your keywords are used in everything you do
and are the key determining factor in how you rank in the search results
among many of the major search engines.

You need to choose keyword phrases that are going to bring sustainable
targeted traffic consisting of potential customers—not just anything
and everything. What you may think is the perfect keyword phrase
may not be used at all by your target market in their search queries,
which is why it is so critical to research and validate your keywords.
Ideally, each page of your Web site is going to focus on a different
set of keywords that are specific to the content at hand. If you were to
focus on the same set of keywords on every page then you would only
hit one small portion of your market potential because you are only
going to hit those same keywords over and over again—it is self-defeating.
As a general rule, you want to target somewhere between two and
five keyword phrases per page.

First, you want to gather a master list of all possible keyword phrases.
To make the data easier to manage you can create different keyword list
profiles that represent individual topics as opposed to trying to cover all
topics in a giant master list. For example, if you have two product lines
then you can create a keyword list for each product line. Naturally,
some keywords are shared across the lists, but it is important to understand
that the people looking for one topic (e.g., “jobs”) are not necessarily
the same people looking for another topic (e.g., “autos”), and as
such they are going to use different keyword combinations in their
searches.

How do you create your master keywords list? Here are four solid
techniques for generating a list of potential keyword phrases:

1. Brainstorming, surveying, and reviewing promotional material

2. Review competing and industry leading Web sites

3. Assess your Web site traffic logs

4. Keyword suggestion and evaluation tools.