Keyword Selection

Choosing keywords

Choosing keywords is one of the most important things related to search engine optimization and unfortunately one of the things people tend to spend too little time on. They think up a few keywords quickly, optimize their pages a bit and then submit them to the engines. This usually results in not-so-good rankings under keywords that are poorly related to the site in question.

Before you start optimizing your site for the search engines, you should spend some time in figuring out exactly what keywords, or what keyphrases, you are going to target. Search engines are an excellent source of traffic, but in order to utilize them to their full potential, some effort is required.

What you should do is not to rush things. Sit down, open up your favorite text editor in one window and your site in another. Read through the first page of your site. When you have read it, stop to think. What is this page about? Which of the words that appear in the document describe the contents of the page accurately? What kind of words or phrases would someone use if he was using a search engine and trying to find documents like this?

When you have found the answers to these questions, write down the words and the phrases you have come up with. It doesn't matter if the list becomes too long, as you can always remove some of the excess words later.