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Why is learning how to choose keywords so important? If you are like most bloggers, a at least some of your website traffic will arrive via a search engine. Would you like to get more traffic from search engines? We all would and the way to go about it is to optimize our web pages for these search engines. But before launching a Search Engine Optimization campaign, the first thing you will need to learn is how to choose keywords. Choosing keywords forms the basis of any on-page search engine optimization strategy. This article offers some useful tips on how to choose keywords.

What Are Keywords?

 

In a nutshell, keywords are what describe your web page. Keywords are how search engines index and catalog your web page. The algorithms the search engines use will attempt to pick out the key words and phases used on your page in an attempt categorize your content, so that when someone performs a search they can display relevant results.

 

Put another way, keywords are what a prospective reader will use to find your website. It’s the word or phrase they will type into a search engine when they are looking for something. It’s important to keep this in mind when choosing keywords.

 

Why Choosing Keywords Is So Important?

 

Think of keywords as the basis of a free advertising campaign. If you choose keywords well and optimize your web page to target the correct keywords, you can expect search engines to send a fair amount of traffic your way - all well targeted and completely free.

 

How Would You Search For Your Site?

 

Spend some time thinking about what keywords or phrases people would use to look for your site. What would you enter into a search engine if you were looking for the type of content your site contains. Ask friends and family how they would look for it.

 

Once you have a few ideas, you might like to expand your list using a keyword suggestion tool. Wordtracker has a Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. You simply enter your keyword, and wordtracker will return a list of up to 100 related keywords or phrases along with an estimate of their daily search volume.

 

The Google Adwords website has another keyword tool. The tool is designed to help Adwords advertisers plan their campaigns, but can also be of use when choosing keywords. The tool will provide keyword suggestions and average monthly search volume for each of these keywords.

 

Be Specific…

 

When choosing keywords, you are really looking for a specific phrase - the more specific the better. For example, while canon digital camera is better than just digital camera, an even better keyword phrase might be canon digital camera lenses. There are 2 main benefits in choosing keyword phrases which are very specific:

1. You are likely to get better targeted traffic
2. There is likely to be less competition in the search engine rankings

Assuming your page really is about canon digital camera lenses, then the traffic delivered by a search engine for the search canon digital camera lenses is much more likely to be interested in your content than those who were searching for canon digital camera. If you are selling something on or through your page, you will get a much higher conversion ration with better targeted traffic.

 

If you are more specific when choosing keywords, there will far less competition. Continuing on from our digital camera example, we can see the principle illustrated below.