A key part of Search Engine Optimization is keyword optimization. You want your keywords to be in your title, in your content, and in your meta tags. This is important for search engine rankings. So what keywords should you use?

What keywords should you use?

If you are starting a new website, you should probably optimize for less common keywords. For example, if someone did a google search on Search Engine Optimization, I wouldn’t be anywhere near the result set. This is because Search Engine Optimization is a common keyword. Now, if they did a search for web development, seo tips, web 2.0, I am at the top of this search. It is true that a lot more people will search for Search Engine Optimization than web development, seo tips, web 2.0, but anyone who searches for the latter will most likely click on my website. This isn’t a great example because all of the keywords in the niche of SEO are well used, but I hope you understand what I mean.

You should research before you choose what keywords to use. You could use something like https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to determine keywords. For example, if you have a website about boats but boats is a very popular keyword, so you would put boats into Google’s Keyword Tool. It gives you a list of keywords, the amount of competition for that keyword, and some statistics on the keyword. What you want to pay attention too is the green bar. Keywords will a full green bar are highly competative, and keywords with an empty green bar aren’t competatitive at all. Everything else is in between. You should focus on a keyword that gets a significant amount of searches, but isn’t very competative.  For example, if your website was about owning a boat, you could optimize for the keyword boats owners. It gets around 5,000 searches a month, but isn’t very competative.