Keywords! Keywords! and Keywords!  No matter where you go, you surely must have heard these a hell lot of times. In case you have just started with SEO and aren’t familiar with what ‘keywords’ are  then here it is for you – A word or a phrase that describes your site in short is called as a keyword for your site! Of course this is just a too short and basic definition of keywords. If you want to know why they are so important and why there is so buzz about them, read this post of mine.

However, what is sad to see that despite being so important, most people just don’t know how to choose their ‘right’ keywords and settle down for any keyword that either remotely describes their site or is too common for everyone. e.g. if your site is on ‘space’ that has articles on Space Adventures or providing tours of space, it would be useless to choose just ‘space’ as your keyword. You must go for ‘space adventures’ , ‘space travel’ and so on at least to get your ‘targetted’ audience as well as rank well for them. As a matter of fact, any person who is interested in space travel related stuff won’t just search for ‘space’!

So to avoid the above mentioned mistake in your sites, here are 10 rules of thumb that you MUST follow with each and every site:

• Don’t use single words. Use KEYPHRASES!
  e.g. if you have site on migs, don’t use just ‘migs’ as your keyword but use ‘fly mig’,  ‘mig pics’, ‘mig history’ etc.
• Your site’s description must match that of the content you post on it.
• Choose a keyword with less competition.
  e.g. ‘mig aerobatics’ might have more competition than ‘supersonic aerobatics’.  So choosing the later first would be a good idea. However, do include the first keyword as well.
• If your site targets a particular geographical audience, use keywords from those countries in your site’s content. e.g. ladyfinger in U.K. while okra in U.S.
• Choose your primary keyword to optimize for and choose it wisely. Make sure you describe your content well enough as well not have too much of competitors for the same.
• DO consider mis-spellings of your keywords. People many a times mis-spelt while searching. So do check for possible mis-spelt words of your keywords and try to include them as well.
• If you already have some content, edit a bit to accomodate your keywords in it. Reversly, choose keywords based on your exisitng.
• Target highly searched terms that have as little competition as possible. Nevertheless, if you happen to find a keyword with little competition, don’t include it on your web site just for this reason alone.
• Check the keyword density on your site. If a particular keyword is repeated too many times, edit it with some other word. If the density is too much search engines might punish you for excessive usage.
• Finally, test your final list on Google and other search engines. Although, this is too boring but this is important so that you can know if you can really ‘rank’ for those keywords!

You can also use a keywords research service if you have good budget for your website. Some of them provide really good services and can get you kick started in a small budget. There are of course some more points which I will add in other series of articles. However these are most important ones as far as I think. Feel free to add more in comments

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