One of the most important parts, perhaps the most important part, of doing SEO for your website is to carefully choose your keywords. These are the words that search engines pick up on and use to categorise your site. If you don’t include a large variety of keywords or only use a few keywords, you may be missing out on a lot of web traffic.
The first thing to do is sit down and make a list of phrases and words associated with your site. This list needs to be comprehensive and include singular and plural forms of every word. For example, if you’re doing SEO for a florist website, you need to use keywords “flower” and “flowers.” A search engine sees these as two different words. Likewise, use abbreviations and write out the full term (such as “UK” and “United Kingdom”). It’s also OK to have phrases of three or four words as keywords. “Florist London,” “London florist,” and “florist in London” are all good phrases for a flower shop in London.
Once you have a list of all possible keywords, it’s time to narrow the list down a bit. You can’t use every possible keyword, after all. If you have a short list that looks like you could use all of them, you’ve probably left off a number of keywords. Narrow your list down to about fifteen or so. These words can go in your Meta tags on your website. You’ll then want to narrow those down to around five. Use these five keywords in your website text, the alt tags of your images, your page titles, and any other place you have text.
After several months, you may want to look over your list of keywords again and study your website hits carefully. It may be that several keywords you decided to use on your page aren’t as useful as you thought, and you may need to replace them.
