Choosing the right keywords

Nowadays, optimizing you website has become a necessity to compete and strive in the World Wide Web. Search engine optimizing your site whether doing your SEO work in-house or delegating it to seo professionals should be thought about comprehensively just like any other business venture.
It’s important to get the basics right by having a clear idea about your website’s target audience profile and website content. You need to focus on what the major search engines like Google or Yahoo consider search engine friendly and be familiar with the guidelines they provide. One aspect search engine optimization experts do point out that’s important in the start up process is keyword selection.
Since the aim of optimizing a site is to put it on top or as close to the top of the SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages, you need to determine the right keywords to use and concentrate on.

So how do you get the right keywords?

You need to consider two things: the first one is to get a list of ‘in demand’ or popular keywords relevant to your business, service or website. You can start by choosing from at least five to ten keywords which you think may lead visitors to check out your site and there are a number of free internet tools that will help you determine which key terms are being used the most for searches or find out which isn’t being used at all.
One of the most popular tools available is Overture’s keyword selector. By entering at most a three word phrase in its suggestion tool field, you can compile keywords ranked according to popularity with all other terms closely related to keywords being used in the search. Overture constantly updates its searches every month so while your ‘keyword’ may not be as popular next month as it is now, it will give you a general idea of what words or phrases most internet users make use of. Aside from this useful tool, you can also check keyword popularity through Wordtracker, Google AdWord’s Keyword Suggestions, and Guidebeam.

Look out for the competition!

You don’t want to be a little fish in a large ocean full of large predatory sharks. A keyword’s strength is its ability to surpass its competition. So you might want to start from the less competitive ones. How do we determine competition? Since we are now in the Google era, it would be efficient to use the Google search. Enter your search keywords at Google and it will bring you to its SERP’s. On the top right navigational bar, you will find the total number of pages that target your keyword searched. With this figure you can an idea of how many are competing for your searched keyword. It is easier and faster to rank well with a keyword where there are only 100,000 sites to compete against rather than with a keyword that has over half a billion contenders.