Search engines are a free way to get customers to your business. To have this happen you have to pick carefully chosen keywords and phrases. The right keywords are like free yellow page ads. Work with good ones and a flood of targeted traffic will visit your site. If you do not pick with care, you will waste your time, so you need to do it right.
First gather and evaluate possible keywords and phrases. You may already have an idea of words, start with this and follow a few simple steps so you can find some easy traffic.
Think like your customers; write a short list of potential search words and phrases you would search to find your site. When you get a small list go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and enter one of your keywords. Google will generate related keywords and an estimate of their search volume. This should give you a good list. Spend some time; try different words and different combinations of keyword phrases.
Popularity does not necessary make a keyword a good choice. It needs to be specific to what your company sells. The more specific your keyword is, the more likely it is buyers will find your site. Build up a good size list and then narrow it down to words and phrases that will direct the highest number of buying visitors to your web site.
As an example, the keyword "food" is a very popular, but your company sells bread. Millions of people searched Google for the word "food" last month and there was hundreds of thousands of web sites trying to outdo each other for that word. "Olive bread" will not get near as many Google searches, but it will not have near the number of sites competing for that phrase. You still may have over 10,000 people a month searching Google for "olive bread".
It will take you a great amount of effort to get to the top of the first page of Google results for the word "food" and you may not be able to do it at all. Getting to the top for "food " will get you thousands of people interested in buying everything from tomatoes to potatoes. Getting to the top of the list for "olive bread" will get you people looking for olive bread.
Brand names often make great keywords. Many brand names get over a thousand searches a month and do not have much competition.
You want people to find you who are ready to make a purchase; this requires playing around until you find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most interested buyers to you site. This requires putting yourself inside the mind of your soon to be customers to figure out what word or phrase a person looking for your product will use to search for you.
Your work is not done once you have chosen your keywords and added them to your web pages. You must continue to evaluate and test keywords to achieve search engine success.