the most important single factor for successful SEO and the single least focused on and talked

about. Many of my clients have done no keyword research, and many have no idea how to go about

it, so I figured it would be a valuable topic to touch on here.

What is keyword selection and why is it so important?

Every store owner I've spoken with wants to rank well in the search engines. But many have no

idea what terms they want to rank well for, and they have no idea how to determine what will be

required in order to rank well for a given term. This is the most fundamental requirement for a

successful SEO campaign. It is like running a race. If you have no idea how long the race is,

where the finish line is located or approximately what time you'll have to run in order to have

a chance of winning, you have very little chance of winning the race no matter how fast you run.

Similarly, no matter what you do with you title tag, meta tags, header tags, body copy etc., if

you don't know what you are trying to rank for, you are not likely to do well.

Targeting refers to how well targeted the

keyword or keyword phrase is for your business. This is where proper keyword research begins.

First make a list of all of the keywords and phrases that people looking for your products are

likely to be searching for, and rank them based on those that are most targeted vs. least

targeted. For example, if you are selling holiday supplies, the keyword ?Christmas? may come

to mind, but it is not very targeted. Most people searching for the term Christmas? are not

going to be interested in your products. ?Christmas Tree Ornaments? on the other had, is a

highly targeted term. People searching for that term are much more likely to be looking for what

you sell. The more targeted the keywords you go after, the higher your conversion rate will be.

And after all, we are not interested in traffic for traffic's sake. We are interested in SALES.

Targeting is something that you as the store owner should know more about than any SEO you work

with. If you work with an SEO and they don't begin by asking you something about what terms

your specific market is likely searching for, be suspicious. If you do this part wrong and

everything else right, you may get lots of traffic, but you may not sell any more.

Popularity refers to how many people are searching for a given term. The more popular a term, the

more people search for that term or phrase. Obviously, ranking well for popular terms will bring

more traffic than ranking well for non-popular terms. There are several ways to determine how

popular a term is. The most common are by using Yahoo

hre="http://www.searchenginerankings.com.au">Search Marketings Keyword Selection Tool and

WordTracker's tool. You can see the results of both at Digital Point web site here:

http://www.searchenginerankings.com.au. You have to register, but it is free. It will show you

both Yahoo Search Marketing's numbers for how many searches per month for a given keyword as

well as WordTracker's numbers. I wouldn't focus too much on the actual numbers they show. Pay

more attention to the number for one term vs. another, so that you can see which is more popular.

Competitiveness refers to how many other sites are also targeting the same keyword or phrase and

how well optimized they are. Obviously, the more competitive a keyword, the harder it will be for

you to rank for it. To determine how many sites you are competing with, just search Google for

the given term or phrase. At the top right of the screen, Google will tell you how many results

there are. Anything under 1,000,000 results is usually pretty non-competitive. That is not always

the case, but it is a good rule of thumb. Anything between 1 and 10 million results is generally

somewhat competitive, and anything over 10 million is usually very competitive.