In any serious attempt to optimize your website, you must first target the right keywords for your website. What are the "right" keywords you might ask? The right keywords are words that fall into a few categories. First, you have to find keywords that specifically match the product or service that you are selling. If you are selling shoes and you target for the broad keyword of "shoes," when you really only sell running shoes, you will draw unwanted and unneeded traffic. When people looking for basketball shoes type in shoes and find your website, not only have they wasted their time, but you have also not sold your product. That is why it is important to target the keyword "running shoes" if that is the type of product you sell.
The keywords you target must also not be in excessive competition. If the word running shoes has 100 million competitors, you might want to rethink your keyword choice. You need to be able to find a word that is specific and has competition that you can beat. Fortunately for you, you do not have to do this on your own. There is a great tool that is free that can help you find keywords related to yours that might not have as much competition. The tool is called Good Keywords and is very useful in planning your SEO strategy.
Once you have picked a possible keyword, to find out the possible competition, all you have to do is go to Google and type your word into the search engine. At the top right of the page it should say "Results 1-10 of about 1,000,000..." The 1,000,000 is the number of results Google found for that keyword and thus your competition. If the number there is too big you can open up the Good Keywords program, type in your keyword, and the program will generate a list of words closely related to yours and tell you how many times they were searched in the Overture search engine. Take this number times about 2 or 3 and that will give you an approximate number of times it was searched in Google. I would shoot for a number searched 1,000 times or less in Overture to start with.
Using this process, pick out 1 to 3 words to do further investigation with. Once you have a found a few keywords that have average competition, it is time to analyze them. Type in your keyword in the Google search area and look at the first few pages. First check out the URL of the top results. If the URLs of the top results do not look like www.domain.com then that is good for you. Google gives more importance to homepages, so it will give more precedence to your homepage over someone else's subpage. Also look to see if you can find the keyword throughout the page, whether it be in information paragraphs, the header, or the page title. Sometimes, there is little evidence of the keyword throughout the page. Take in a general idea of what you see because you are going to have to out do these pages. If you do exactly what these top pages are doing plus a little more, it would be logical to think that you can take the top spot.
Once you have found keywords that are specifically targeted with average competition, then you can move on to begin optimizing your page or pages with these keywords. Make sure to take your time when doing this step and do it thoroughly, because once you have chooses your keywords it is hard to go back. If you do this step right, it will make the coming steps much easier and improve your chances of getting a high listing in the search engines.
