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.