For SEO, the importance of choosing keywords for your web site cannot be over-emphasized enough, in my opinion.

WHEN TO START CHOOSING KEYWORDS

Hopefully you started considering your keywords for your future SEO efforts when you were deciding what domain to buy. If not, stop posting, writing or adding pages until you give keywords some serious thought! You’ll see why I say that below.

WHEN TO STOP CHOOSING KEYWORDS

Stop choosing keywords when you are going to take your website down, stop blogging, when you want your traffic to drop, when you have too much money and other things that essentially mean DON’T stop considering your keywords until you are done with your website and want to kill it, or want it to die away.

SEO KEYWORDS EXAMPLE

So let’s consider a fictional web site owner who lives in a small town outside of a large city or heavily populated suburban area, Feerkle’s Auto Repair and Maintenance Shop. So this fictional website owner buys feerklesautorepair.com and focuses SEO efforts on the keyword phrase “Feerkle’s Auto Repair”. Time passes and the new domain gets into the search engines and lo and behold Feerkle’s Auto Repair is first on Google and Yahoo!

A year passes and our fictional owner gets 2 phone calls from people that found his web site, and in each case he finds that his great work got him some word-of-mouth advertising that sent a couple of people to the internet looking for Mr. Feerkle’s Auto Repair shop.

Feerkle gets a little discouraged and calls his buddy at AAA Windshield Replacement and Brakes. His buddy explains that he had to start referring people to other mechanics in the area because he got dozens of calls each week. Feerkle asks what he did special on his website and his buddy replies that someone advised him that “windshield replacement” and “brake repair” would be pretty good keywords for his business, if he didn’t mind doing a lot of windshield and brake work.

THE SEO LESSON?

CLICK TO ENLARGE

The story of Mr Feerkle demonstrates an interesting and powerful SEO lesson – it doesn’t matter if you rank #1 if no one searches for what you are ranking for – even if its on Google and Yahoo where you rank so well.

Software like WebCEO and Wordtracker (and others) can help you figure out what get’s searched for the most and has the least competition> That being said you may already have an idea of who your competition already and you can check the search engines yourself to more information.

WHERE TO PLACE KEYWORDS FOR GOOD SEO

Now everyone knows the only place you need to worry about keywords is in your keywords META tag, right? Wrong. As a matter-of-fact, though the keywords META tag isn’t completely dead its not as important as it used to be. Places to work your TOP keywords into include your HTML title tag, META description tag, your page headers (h1, h2, etc…), your content, your ALT tags, TITLE tags, domain name, folder name, and page names, not necessarily in order from most to least important. If you run a blog you also have categories and tags to consider.

Remember when you are placing keywords, that they need to be easily read by people as well as search engines. A web page with a h1 header like “Windshield Replacement, Auto Repair, Brake Repair” is probably going to be more confusing than a h1 header of “Auto Repair” with a h2 “Windshield Replacement” and another h2 header using “Brake Repair”.