Have you ever been in a room where people are talking, but you don't understand a thing about the topic, or perhaps even the language? It's similar online. You have to start communicating on your website using the terminology that your visitors use. If you use the right terminology and phrases, not only do they find you, but (to use my analogy) you also let them in on the joke. If you're using the wrong terminology, then you're leaving your visitor a bit confused, a bit foggy, feeling a bit left out of it all. How do you avoid this on your website? When selecting your keywords, follow three simple guidelines:

1. The traffic potential of your keywords
Obviously, you want the search engines to drive lots of traffic to your website. However, quantity should never be your first objective. Quality traffic should be what you're looking for. Your goal is to optimize your pages for the keywords that bring the highest numbers of prospects. Find the keyword phrases related to your industry that your target market is searching for. So, first, find out the terms that are being used by the general public by using a tool like the Overture keyword suggestion tool. Others are available, such as the one at Google. Wordtracker is also worth the investment. But before you rush off and start optimizing your site for the keywords you find, take heed of the second guideline: gauging visitor intent.

2. The visitor's intent
Test the phrase in the search engines you're going to optimize for. For instance, our own keyword research showed that "conversion website" is a phrase people are using in the search engines; however, if you search on Google using this exact phrase, you will see that people are actually looking for money conversion, religious conversion, weights, and metric conversion, etc., not sites about converting site visitors to buyers. This is why you need to look for the real reason why people are searching. In our case, "conversion website" might be worth testing on pay-per-click, but it's not worth optimizing our organic pages for that phrase.

3. Traffic potential in terms of conversion
The next step is keyword measurement and experimentation. We decided to optimize for "improving website conversion" because this phrase showed that there should be reasonable traffic levels, good intent, and a high number of conversions. We found that 27.8% of people using that search term end up subscribing to our newsletter. When a person enters those keywords into a search engine, we're speaking their language, because our entire website is a resource about what they're looking for. To do this yourself, identify keyword phrases that you think fit well with the first two guidelines above, and then measure the result. It's about selecting the keywords immediately relevant to what your audience is looking for.