Search engine rankings are competitive. This makes sense as a page's ranking has significant impact on traffic volume, and ultimately to the success of a business. High rankings are partially driven by the savvy use of keywords. With that in mind, below is what I have gathered from multiple sources about choosing and using keywords and, as usual, I’ve also included useful links at the bottom of the post.

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are the words and phrases people use when they search for a webpage. Many companies put a lot of effort into optimizing their websites around sets of keywords. The goal is to drive as much targeted traffic to the website as possible. Obviously, the overall content of the page should be in line with the keywords; the keywords need to deliver what they promise or visitors will just click away again.

Choosing Keywords

The first thing to do when coming up with a list of keywords is to think of all the possible terms people are likely to use to search for the site. It should be fairly easy to come up with a preliminary list; hopefully you know your viewers and have a pretty good idea of what they’re interested in.

It’s also worth having a look at traffic sources for your website; what phrases have people used in the past to find your site? This is an excellent source of keywords; however, these are keywords that already exist on your site. If you rely on these alone for direction, then you may be missing out on other good keywords.

Once a list has been put together, you can further expand that list with tools like Google’s keyword tool. (This tool is actually to help businesses generate keyword lists for their AdWords placements, but works for this application as well.) This tool will pull up a list of suggested keywords related to the keywords you enter.

So now you (hopefully) have a huge list of potential keywords to optimize your site with, but you obviously can’t use all of them. How do you choose the ones to use? The first step is to decide on keyword phrases rather than just keywords.

Typically, keyword phrases of two to three words are a better choice than single keywords. Using a phrase makes the search more specific and so fewer sites come up. To take an example, it’s the difference between searching for “frog” and “red-eyed tree frog” on Google. The number of results for “red-eyed tree frog” is just 0.56% of that for “frog.” Phrases can significantly narrow the pool of competition. (Specific keywords are also good for searchers; the more specific the keyword phrase, the more likely they’ll find the page they want.)

How Your Keywords Stack Up

So now you’ve got a list of keyword phrases that might work. Choose the best ones; the ones most relevant to your content and most likely to draw the viewers you want. Then enter them into a search engine and see how the competition stacks up. How many results are pulled up when the keyword phrase is entered into a search engine? The more results, the more competitive the keyword.

Conventional wisdom is that new sites should be optimized for moderately popular keyword phrases. The logic is that it will be hard for a new site to get into the top rankings of a very popular keyword, but that it is possible to get top rankings for a less popular, more targeted keyword. While the volume of people who search for the less popular targeted keyword will be smaller, since the site will rank higher in the more targeted keyword search, it can draw more visitors.

Keyword Use and Placement

Once you have the keywords narrowed down, each page should be optimized for one keyword phrase. The content of the page should be composed with that keyword in mind.

I also had a look into where the keywords should be placed. This is something that clearly changes as search engines change, but common wisdom is that keywords should be placed in:

• Title
• Content Headings (titles and subtitles)
• URLs / file name
• Image alt tag
• Link text, e.g. use “learn more about our cat grooming services” rather than “find out more!”
• Body copy

Depending on who you ask, keyword density in the body copy should be anything between 3 and 20 percent. There are dire warnings on various sites against having either too high or too low a keyword density. While the exact percentage seems to be under debate, the most sensible advice I came across is to write the content so that it reads naturally to humans.

Final Thoughts

Keyword optimization isn’t something that gets done once and then never needs to be updated. Like most things on the web, it requires regular maintenance. Also, search engines change how they index pages over time. What works now, may not work in the future. Keep up to date. Track results. Respond to changes. And look on the bright side, search engine changes are an opportunity to improve your search rankings.

More Information

How to do keyword research and learn what your customers need

Choosing keywords

Simple Rules for Keyword Selection: Self promotional, but they have interesting points

Where To Use Keywords

Keyword Placement: Not All Search Engines Are the Same