Keyword selection

The first step in search engine optimization. It's also where most people go wrong. If you pick a keyword that is not used by the people hunting for your product, you won't get traffic. You must pick popular keywords to be found.

Choosing the Right keywords to target your intended audience with is more than vital, it’s the whole ball game. The best way to do this is by using a large-scale keyword generation software & services such as Wordtracker or Keyword Elite.



However, if you take the time to do it right, you can find all the same keywords yourself, albeit more slowly, by using an excellent free web-based tool offered by Digital Point Solutions, simply called the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. It actually queries both Yahoo’s (Overture) data as well as Google’s AdWords keyword data, for each and every keyword search you run. Better yet, it let’s you drill down to be as specific as you want.

The only thing this doesn’t tell you is how much people are willing to pay for each term in PPC engines like AdWords and Y!SM. This is valuable data I suggest you use for in-depth campaigns, especially for AdSense Publishers, however at this point it’s not necessary. SEOing your website is strictly the art of choosing the MOST RELEVANT keywords to your desired audience. All else needs to be forgotten at this stage.

Build up as big a list as possible, keeping all keywords on your list relevant. I suggest using a spreadsheet like MS-Excel to store them, so you can sort them by demand as well.

The way you get lots of people to your site is by choosing the highest-demand keywords on that list and using them in your site often. After you’ve built your whole list, sort by demand, and use those with the biggest numbers the most across your website.

It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but you can easily see the pattern here. For those perfectionists out there, I’ve perfected the process instructions on my old SEO website:

http://www.internetoptimization.net/keyword_services.html