How to create an SEO keyword strategy

As we have discussed in a previous post, keywords are how your customers find you. They type in a series of relevant terms in hopes of finding the content they desire. Optimizing your website for search is the first step to attracting customers. But doing so requires a bit of thought.

1. Create a list of 3–5 keywords relevant to your business.Think like you’re using the brain of someone searching for your product with a search engine. For small- and medium-sized businesses, your keywords are not your brand name. Instead, think of words and short phrases that get to the core of what your product or service is about.
2. Choose keywords based on difficulty and relevance. Some very general words such as “marketing” or “business” are very competitive, making it harder to rank well for them in search engine results. If you are a small- or medium-sized business, you probably want to choose less competitive keywords, more specifically related to your business (these are commonly referred to as long tail keywords).
3. Design and optimize your website around your keywords.Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, you should incorporate them into your website.

Clearly there is more to it than that, and successful internet marketers spend a substantial amount of time on this task, but this gives you an idea of what to think about as you optimize your website for search.

Avoid keyword "stuffing"

After reading these blog posts on SEO and keywords, you might think, keywords are really important and perhaps the best strategy is to just fill my page with these keywords. Unfortunately it’s not that easy. Apart from leading to a bad experience for site visitors, search engines are smart enough to detect these behaviors. Trying to ‘trick’ search engines is not a good SEO strategy, and sacrificing readability for SEO is not a good idea either.

What’s your experience with keywords? What issues are you facing? Let us know what you think!

Want to know more? Check out our eBook: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing, which provides more detail on this topic.