SEO: Choosing your Keywords

Choosing keywords is not an easy task and must be approached with much care. If you are planning on relying on search engines to generate traffic and visitors it is essential that you are targeting the right keywords and keyphrases for your target marketing, otherwise people may be landing on your site who are looking for something completely different. It is a common belief that most website traffic will come from a handful of 2-3 word phrases. But if a website has a lot of good information and is content rich, then traffic can be generated from hundreds of search terms, many 4+ words in length (commonly called long-tail search terms).

Choosing the right keywords

So forgetting about long-tail searches for the time being, it is best to choose phrases that are around 2-4 words and accurately describe your website’s offerings in general everyday language that people are most likely to search. One thing you must bear in mind is how competitive those keywords are. If your keywords are very general and not targeted enough, then it is likely that they will be too competitive and ranking on the first page will be very difficult. Even if you do rank well for a competitive search term, it is quite likely that your traffic may not convert as people are very often searching for something specific. But do consider that if your keywords are too specific your site will be harder to find, resulting in fewer visitors to your site through search engines.
A good tool to use for researching your keywords is the Google AdWords Tool. You can type in your desired keywords and the tool will tell you how competitive they are and how many searches a month they receive.
Remember that search engines rank pages, not whole websites, so you needto target different keywords on different pages and not the same keywords on all pages. You might go for a more general term on your home page, and more specific terms on sub pages.

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