In the first part of this series, we took a brief look at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and how it works. In this post, we’ll take a more in-depth look at keyword selection. Keywords are the foundation to any SEO campaign. Whether optimizing a new site, or refining an existing one, creating a strategy for choosing and optimizing your keywords is a critical step.

At first you may think choosing a couple keywords to describe your site should be pretty easy, right? Well, yes and no. There are several factors to consider when selecting the most effective keywords for your site. To begin, it is important to understand that the most effective SEO strategy involves optimizing every page and not just your home page. When selecting keywords you can always start with more general keywords for your top-level pages and then be more specific on secondary pages. Optimizing every page is critical since they all generate traffic to your site.

When selecting keywords, you not only want to pick words that describe your content, you also want to think about words that would be used to describe your site. The Web is so densely populated with content that it is nearly impossible to obtain a top rating for a one-word search string, therefore optimizing your site using keywords, as well as specific key phrases is a much more effective approach.

Most searches are three words or more and when people search for answers, they often phrase their search terms as questions. Therefore, when thinking about your keywords and phrases think like your audience or potential customer and ask yourself “what search phrases will people most likely use to look for the content on this site?” or “what questions does this site answer?”

As we were selecting keywords for our own SEO strategy, our research made it apparent that it would not be wise to focus our keyword strategy on a broad subject like “graphic design” since the chances of users finding our site amongst over 65 million search results are slim. Instead, we used other, less competitive phrases that are most likely to be used by people trying to find us. Pairing “graphic design” with more specific phrases such as “association magazine redesign” significantly narrows down the search results and also provides a more accurate description of the services we provide.

If you are not sure where to start, or you to want refine your selected keywords and phrases, there are several helpful online resources to help, such as Google’s Keyword Tool. This tool lets you enter the URL of your Web site, or of any site related to your business, and suggests a list of relevant keywords based on the site’s content. It also shows statistics of the search popularity as well as the level of competition for the various keywords. Online tools like this are a great help, and I certainly recommend using them, but ultimately your own understanding of your pages and your audience should be the basis for determining your SEO strategy.

After you have brainstormed, researched, and selected your keywords, it’s time to incorporate them into your site. In the next post, we’ll look at how and where to use them, including placement within the title tags, header tags, URLs, and body copy.

Related articles in Align:
• What is SEO
• Keyword Placement for SEO

Read more posts by Mike Barkley