My last posts talked a little bit about what SEO is and why you need to care. Hopefully you’ve read those and are going to try to beef up your website by having it optimized.

Today we’ll talk about what keywords you should use.

Rule #1. Forget about trying to optimize on your name or business name.

If you come up on the top of Google’s list of results when your own name or business name is searched, that doesn’t mean you’re doing okay. The exception to this rule is if you’re an established brand (think Coca Cola or Lego) or a celebrity.

For the rest of us, we want people to find us because we’re not yet household names.

Start making a list of things you think people are searching for to find you. Let’s say you make organic candles in your candle shop in Maine. Your list might look like:

• where can I find candles in Maine
• homemade candles in Maine
• natural and organic candles
• Maine organic candles

And so on and so forth.

You take your list and you go to Google’s fun keyword tool. (There are more scientific ways to do this but this method will do if you’re the DIY type.)

Start to enter your phrases and see which ones are actually being searched. (You’ll be surprised to see that what you think people are searching for is likely different than what they actually are searching for.)

You’re looking for a high number here but keep an eye on the advertiser competition. There’s no point trying to optimize on a phrase that gets 10,000 searches a month if there are a gazillion other sites already optimized for that phrase.

For example, in the case of our candle maker, he needn’t bother trying to optimize on the phrase “candles” because there would be hundreds of thousands of websites out there already trying to get traffic on that phrase. The age of a domain counts in search too, so sites that have been in existence for years are likely not going to budge much from their position in Google’s search results.

You want to find the sweet spot. The phrase that gets lots of searches…that’s targeted…that doesn’t have a lot of competition. That’s why I would recommend our candle maker use his location or his niche (the fact that his candles are natural and organic) when searching for keywords to optimize on.

Makes sense, right? Any questions?

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