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Choosing Keywords

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Probably one of the most important optimization steps for our website is the selection of keywords. If you don't have good keywords, then all that hard work that went into great site design goes for nothing. Inversely to that is the fact that choosing the right keywords will help your website be a great success. Keywords are a part of your website that must be changed and updated on a continual basis. They must also be maintained site wide, and vary to make sections of the site more relevant. This not only helps your visitors find more relevant data, but helps Google realize how relevant your data really is. Since we are concentrating on SEO on the cheap, this will help us gain a higher position within Google for search phrases that will generate free traffic.

Choosing the right keywords is extremely important, but just as important is making sure we don't fall victim to some of the most common mistakes made, when deciding on our target words. Some of the most common mistakes are as follows:

• Targeting only individual words
• Broad words
• Targeting STOP words
• Too many targeted words
• No variations on keywords
• Not using multiple keywords

Before I start putting keywords on my site, I have a brainstorming session and write down all the keywords and phrases that I think might be relevant to my site.

When doing this, I also try to put myself in the shoes of the person that might find my site. If I were looking for the content that's going to be on my site, what kind of things would I search on to get that content. So in that search box in my browser, what would I type to find a particular piece of content. In keeping with our T-Shirt site, what keywords and phrases can we think of that are relevant to this site?

Lets first start with some of the words and phrases that come to mind immediately. Later we will worry about trimming the list down, but first lets get our mind working. Here are a few that I thought of when doing the T-Shirt site.

T-Shirts, Tees, Shirts, Funny Shirts, Humorous, Comical, Cynical, Clothing, Cheap, Hilarious, ride, crude, retro, silly, cute, cool, college

That's a pretty nice list, but it's not complete, and surely we can do a little bit better. One thing you'll notice is that most of those keywords are single keywords. Single words are great if they are relevant, but multiple keywords can be even better. Think of it this way, if you were doing a search for some funny t-shirts, would you just type in "T-Shirts"? I don't think so, so the use of multiple keywords can really help us out here.

A common mistake is that many people think using only single words as your target is the way to go. This is a big misconception, and sometimes it might be too late until you realize your mistake. Using multiple words in a phrase is often times more relevant and almost always more specific. By using more words, we eliminate some of the competition because they are only targeting single words, plus we are making our site much more relevant to real world searches. This is all Google goodness because multiple words and phrases gives us a better chance of getting a higher position on Google.

To revisit our keywords from earlier, the word "Shirt", although relevant, it does appear to be a bit broad and not specific enough for our site. How about something a little bit better, like "Funny Shirts" or "Hilarious Tees". Again we are using the same keywords, we are just combining them to make them more search specific. Remember, choosing keywords isn't just about capturing the traffic that we want, it's also about not capturing the irrelevant traffic. By being more specific we are telling the search engine exactly the type of content we have.

Now that we have a good start on a list of keywords, we need to start making decisions on whether they are good or not. To do this we are going to concentrate on using two free tools that I use a lot for keyword generation.

In our next post we will cover these tools and see what kind of results they generate for us. After that we'll implement those keywords in our site and watch the visitors start to show up.

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