Keywords are really the cornerstone of any SEO program. Your keywords play a large part in determining where in search rankings you’ll land, and they also mean the difference between a user’s finding your page and not. So when you’re picking keywords, you want to be sure that you’ve selected the right ones. The only problem is, how do you know what’s right and what’s not?

Selecting the right keywords for your site means the difference between being nobody on the Web, and being the first site that user’s click to when they perform a search. You’ll be looking at two types of keywords. The first is brand keywords. These are keywords associated with your brand. It seems pretty obvious that these keywords are important; however, many people don’t think they need to pay attention to these keywords, because they’re already tied to the site. Not true. Brand keywords are just as essential as the second type, generic keywords.

Generic keywords are all the other keywords that are not directly associated with your company brand. So if your web site, TeenFashions.com, sells teen clothing, then keywords such as clothing, tank tops, cargo pants, and bathing suits might be generic keywords that you could use on your site.

Going back to brand keywords for a moment, if you don’t use the keywords contained in your business name, business description, and specific category of business, you’re missing out. It seems as if it wouldn’t be necessary to use these keywords, because they’re already associated with your site, but if you don’t own them, who will? And if someone else owns them, how will they use those keywords to direct traffic away from your site?

Before we go too much further in this description of keywords and how to choose the right one, you should know that keywords fall into two other categories: those keywords you pay a fee to use (called pay-per-click), and those naturally occurring keywords that just seem to work for you without the need to pay someone to ensure they appear in search results (these are called organic keywords).

When you think about purchasing keywords, these fall into the pay-per-click category. When you stumble upon a keyword that works, that falls into the organic category.

When you begin considering the keywords that you’ll use on your site, the best place to start brainstorming is with keywords that apply to your business. Every business has its own set of buzzwords that people think about when they think about that business or the products or services related to the business. Start your brainstorming session with words and phrases that are broad in scope, but may not bring great search results. Then narrow down your selections to more specific words and phrases, which will bring highly targeted traffic. Table 4-1 shows how broad keywords compare to specific key phrases.

What’s the Right Keyword Density?

Keyword density is hard to quantify. It’s a measurement of the number of times that your keywords appear on the page, versus the number of words on a page - a ratio, in other words. So if you have a single web page that has 1,000 words of text and your keyword appears on that page 10 times (assuming a single keyword, not a keyword phrase), then your keyword density is 1 percent.

What’s the right keyword density? That’s a question that no one has been able to answer definitively. Some experts say that your keyword density should be around five to seven percent, and others suggest that it should be a higher or lower percentage. But no one seems to agree on exactly where it should be.

Because there’s no hard and fast rule, or even a good rule of thumb, to dictate keyword density, site owners are flying on their own. What is certain is that using a keyword or set of keywords or phrases too often begins to look like keyword stuffing to a search engine and that can negatively impact the ranking of your site.

See, there you are. Not enough keyword density and your site ranking suffers. Too much keyword density and your site ranking suffers. But you can at least find out what keyword density your competition is using by looking at the source code for their pages.

Tags: Choosing Keywords, Keyword Analysis, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Tips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 12:35 am and is filed under Daily SEO Tips, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.