I’ve written a lot about keywords and keyword research over the months. This is an important topic for serious online businesses. Get it right and you’re golden, get it wrong and everything else you will do is for nothing. You might be interested to read what I wrote on SEOMoz a while back on the subject.

The Web is no longer the brand new place it was just a few years ago, and most of us take it completely for granted. It has become an essential part of our lives. That said, it still amazes me how many websites there are out there, thrown together without care or concern for keywords.
Keywords are Key!at house?

A successful, well-thought-out keyword strategy is essential to online success, and ideally your keyword research will take place even before you design your site, because then you can plan for pages.
And if you’re not sure how to go about it, you need to get an expert to do it for you. There are lots of angles for choosing keywords. For example, if you have a site selling t-shirts, you’ll want to include “t-shirts” in your list of keywords (phrases) that you want to be listed for. But when a customer is looking for t-shirts to buy online, in all likelihood they will try to narrow their research. Maybe they want organic cotton? (organic cotton, organic t-shirts and so on). Maybe they want a t-shirt with a logo on it? Perhaps they want to buy wholesale t-shirts to put their own logo on?

Some website owners understand this, but they reason that since more people actually search for just plain “t-shirts”rather than “organic t-shirts,” they’ll lose customers if they pick the keywords that are searched for less. Wrong!

A keyword that is searched more often is more competitive. It’s unlikely that you’ll get to the top of a search for a competitive keyword in a short period of time. It’s usually much easier to optimize for a niche. And there’s another point to consider: if you are optimized for tightly-focused search terms, your visitors are far more likely to be in search of precisely what you’re offering, so you’ll get satisfyingly higher conversion rates.

Of course you don’t have to forget the highly competitive search terms. You can optimize some of your inner pages for them. Which brings me to another point. Never put more than six keywords on a page. And if you can optimize for just two or three, so much the better. Having more pages on your rates doesn’t cost more, and it can only help your site to rank better. Especially if you have plenty of links from one page to another, and from outside your website too!

To be effective, your website needs to be empowered. Picking the right keywords for your business is no less than a process of empowerment.

It’s common for copywriters who don’t know about search engine optimization to knock SEO, saying it’s not necessary and that’s it’s akin to snake oil. They are wrong, wrong, wrong. If you listen to these people, you are rendering your website impotent. Someone who knows better will be able to get a higher ranking than you with no effort whatsoever. So how should you go about making sure you have the right keywords? If you read through many web pages on the subject, they’ll have you believe that you need about ten different software packages, or that you’ll need to hire a consultant who charges $30,000 a day (I’m not kidding).

Now I defend the right of professionals to charge what they’re worth, but that’s going a little overboard, unless it’s an extremely competitive website and a whole team of experts are to be employed.

Here’s what to do if you’re doing it yourself. First, think carefully about the words that someone might use to make a search if they were looking for your product or service. Notice I’m talking singular here: if you have a range of services or products, have a different page for each one on your website. If you group stuff together you’re simply diluting your potential strength on the search engines.

So, once you’ve identified a few keywords, put them into a Google search and see what comes up. For about the first ten pages, assuming that they’re relevant, right click on the page. and for Internet Explorer, select “View Source.” For FireFox, click on “View” and then select “Page Source.” At the top, for most pages you’ll find a META tag that lists the keywords for the site. Compare what you’ve got. You may find that you should include further keywords. But don’t use more than six keyphrases for a page. If you have more than that, divide them up and have more than one page.

Always have a description META tag. Again, you’ll find developers and optimization experts who tell you this isn’t necessary. And you’ll even find very successful websites that don’t use them, but ya know, if you use them you are in effect dictating to the search engines the keywords or phrases you want to be indexed for. That’s useful.

There are hundreds of different keyword research tools. The best is Wordtracker. But no need to buy this off the cuff: You can get by very nicely with Yahoo’s free tool: Keyword Selector Tool.