When you begin a search engine optimization (SEO) project, you should decide how many keywords you will use for each page of your website. The most effective way to do this is to choose words that will generate the most traffic to your website.
Step 1: Generate a List of Words
Ensure that your keywords reflect the purpose of your business. What are you selling? What type of services do you offer? After you have drafted a list, take a look at your website content and see if it contains these keywords. This may also give you more ideas for keywords. Keep in mind that you want to choose keywords and phrases that allow your website to benefit from high SEO rankings and traffic.
Step 2: Research Your Competition
Search the Internet and see which keywords are being used by your competitors. Simply type in your keywords in the search box of your search engine to determine which page has the highest SEO page ranking. Choose keywords that are the most popular, but don’t have a lot of competing pages. Look for Meta Keyword tags on your competitor’s page within the content. The tags will look like <meta name=”Keywords” content=”…”> . Do this with the top five search engine results and record them with your other keywords.
Step 3: Discover Keyword Popularity
The next step is to find out the monthly activity or popularity of each keyword. How? Word Tracker, Keyword Discovery, and Google Adwords Keyword Tool will do this nicely for you. Each tool produces a list of relevant keywords based on a single keyword phrase that you type in, and you can use these keywords to add to your list.
Step 4: Choose the Best Keywords
Once you have a list of keywords, choose the words that you think will drive more traffic to your website. Would you type that particular word if you were searching for your website? Are you willing to write more content to incorporate more keywords? Go through your list and take out words that are irrelevant. Your content should now consist of relevant, effective keywords that your visitors are typing in their search engine. If you do find that certain keywords are misspelled, use the misspelled words in the Meta Keywords tag only.
Summarized from http://bit.ly/guCCac and modified.