If you run a small business it is unlikely that you will have endless amounts of money to spend on marketing. For that reason you need to look for ways to get top search engine rankings without needing to take on the big boys. This article will give you some advice and tips on the best way to target your website to customers.

The first thing we will look at is how to select a group of keywords to choose from and then we will focus on the best forms of keywords for small businesses.

Finding Your Keywords

To many people this appears to be an easy exercise and they think it is just a matter of deciding what you want to come at the top for. However it is not that easy and you need to make sure that the terms you use are the ones that people are actually searching for. Suppose for instance you have chosen a phrase that you think is perfect but there are only 10 searches per month for that phrase what real benefit is there for appearing at the top of the search engines for it? In reality very little so you will be wasting your time and money focusing on it.

So how to you go about selecting keywords? Below is a quick overview:

1. Brainstorm - Write down as many search terms as you can think of. As your friends and family to come up with ideas as well so that you can get as many ideas as possible. You can also use a keyword tool to get some other ideas as well.

2. Research - You now need to research your list of keywords. This means using a keyword tool to find out how many searches there are for each of your keywords on a monthly basis. You should also find out how many results there are for each of your keywords. Once you have done this you will be able to calculate the value of each keyword or the KEI.

3. Selection - You can now select a shortened list of words. You should firstly eliminate those words with a search volume that is too low to be worth looking at. Really if there are less than 100 searches per month you will find there is little value in the phrases. You should also remove phrases with a KEI of less than 0.1 as these are far too competitive to look at.

So you now have a decent selection of keywords but this still leaves you with the dilemma of what the best one to choose is.

Selecting Keywords for a Small Business

You should analyse your keywords for how general they are. The more general the harder it will be to optimise for them. The reason for this is that all the big companies will go for the general terms and they have a much larger budget to throw behind it. This means that it is unlikely you will ever get anywhere with them and if you do it could take several years and a lot of expense.

The best way to look at this is by considering an example. Let's suppose for your business you supply office furniture to businesses. You might find that a generalised term like office furniture is completely dominated by the big companies and so would be difficult to break into. However if you were based in London you might find a term like office furniture supplies based in London is much more effective for your business.

Remember the biggest aim of search engine optimisation is to generate you more traffic and so more business. For that reason you should target keywords and phrases that will benefit your business the most.