A keyword, for those unfamiliar with the term in its online reference, is a word or phrase you want people to search to find your website through search engines like Google. To choose the right keywords, you’ll want to take a look at what products, services or information your company and website offer. Unless you’re a huge company with a widely known brand, you’ll probably want to stay away from using your company name as the sole keyword on your website. After all, the whole idea behind SEO is to help get you traffic through the search engines for words and phrases people search who do not necessarily know of your business.
Start by making a list of your most popular products or services. If your business were a bicycle repair business, you might want to begin with a couple general phrases like “bike repair”, “bike repairs”, “bicycle repairs”, etc. Once you’ve made a short list like this, consider plugging them in to an automated keyword generator like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, a personal favourite of mine. Once you enter in your starting phrases, the service will spit out dozens of related keyword combinations you may not have even considered using on your site.
I highly suggest keeping a list or spreadsheet with all these combinations, as part of a well managed SEO campaign is to test and experiment with different pertinent keyword combinations to ensure the most effective keywords are being used on your site.
Once you have a list of possible keyword combinations, start integrating them one at a time into your website and keep track of traffic brought in by each keyword using statistics software like Google’s free Analytics service. Even if you have a keyword on your site bringing in a significant amount of traffic, don’t be afraid to experiment with other keywords as long as they are relevant to the content on your website. That said, as long as a keyword accurately describes what’s being offered on that particular page, there is no such thing as a wrong keyword.