Choosing Keywords, and why it is important

'Keywords' is one of the most referred to terms, and one of the least understood.

I forget the number of times I have heard marketing companies talking about keywords to their customers, as if they are the be all and end all of getting ranked in search engines. The truth is you need to know what words and phrases you want to be found for within the search engines, but making sure these words are shown 'x' amount of times within the first 'y' words of your body copy just won't do it.

Google,as well as the other search engines regularly changes it's search algorythms so if a 'rule' was identified as being successful - within a few short months that rule will be out of date and not offering the value being promised. As such, your keyword strategy needs to follow through your entire site, and needs revisiting continuously.

The idea is to identify what should be the most profitable keywords for your business and ensure all aspects of the relevant page of your site is optimised for it.

For example, many people want their main home page found for all terms relevant to their business. This surprises me as most 'homepages' are a simple "Welcome to my site, here you will find the things I do etc ..." Now assuming you are selling aquatic equipment which part of this tells the search engines you want to be found for fish food, water pumps, various fish types, snails, plants and weeds and ponds.

Your best bet is to get the relevant pages of your site optimised for the products of services they offer - for example, you should optimise your pages selling ponds, for ponds. You should optimise your fish food pages to show when people search for fish food etc...

The secondary advantage of this to the searcher is that if your fish food pages are found when people search for fish food - when they click on the results from Google and find they end up looking at a page offering to sell them the fish food they want they will buy it. If they end up at a splash page saying "welcome to our site, here you will find the things I do etc ......." and have to search to find the fish food pages, then find the right type, size, etc - it ends up being far harder to purchase.

Make it easy for your customers and they will buy from you, and as long as your service is good, they will come back repeatedly.

To close - make sure the keywords you choose are the right ones for your site, then optimise the right part of your site for each keyword - one or two keywords per page at most and you will find far more success.