One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the correct selection of keywords for your web pages. In all likelihood when you first set out to create your website you will already have thought of your broad theme e.g. weight loss or car sales etc. A common mistake is to think that these broad themes are actually the keywords for the site / page. They are not – they are broad themes and not specific keywords, if you use such broad terms you will struggle to get high rankings in the search engines.

So what is the keyword optimization process and how do you find these hot keywords?. In essence to find the hot keywords you use the key themes you identified for your site (e.g. weight loss or car sales etc) and then determine which actual terms users are searching for. In order to do this you need to be able to determine three critical things:

- What are the related keywords to your key theme
- How many people are searching for these keywords
- How stiff is the competition

Whilst these might sound difficult things to determine in actual fact they are not as the search engines themselves will help you answer these questions and all for free!. Google itself provides a utility called the Google AdWords keyword tool (if you enter these four words into Google you will find it). Once you have found this tool it is very simple to use – just enter your key themes into the box entitled Enter one keyword or phrase per line:, enter the captcha phrase and then you will be presented with a list of related keywords and, best of all, the number of searches per month for these related keywords. For our weight loss example you will get results like weight loss tips, weight loss diet etc

It would be awfully tempting to simply select the related keywords with the highest keywords and use those as the keywords for your site. The flaw in this approach is that that is what everyone else is doing!. The best approach is to start off with some of the less searched keywords – scroll down about half or two thirds of the way and you should be in the right area.

So how many related keywords should you attempt to target?. It is very difficult to optimize a page for more than three sets of keywords so choose no more than this. Select one phrase as your primary and the other two as secondary phrases (I will explain in another article how to optimize these terms within the web page itself).

You now need to get a feeling for how stiff the competition is for your chosen keywords. Again Google is your friend here – simply open a Google search web page and type the first of the keywords you identified above into Google and it will tell you how many sites it has listed for that search term. If there are too many sites already in existence for that term then you may need to chose a different keyword (simply go through the list identified when you used the Google AdWords keyword tool in the previous step. Remember that for the vast majority of keywords there will already be very many sites – my rule of thumb is that any search that gives less than about 5 million results signifies a keyword that is OK to use.

So the key lessons are:

- Identify specific keyword phrases as broad phrases will not work
- Use free tools such as Google AdWords keyword tool to help you select these terms
- Do not aim too high – find terms with reasonable search volumes but less competition
- Do not try and use too many keywords at once – 2 to 3 per page is the optimum number

Of course identifying these keywords is only the first step – you must now learn how to use these keywords to best effect on your web pages. This will be dealt with in another article from us.

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