Do you have a website or are you in the process of getting one. If the answer is yes then you are bound to know the importance of search engines. All website owners want to appear at the top of the search engines but how do you determine what to appear at the top for? The aim of this article is to give you some help with selecting your keywords.

The first thing to know is what keywords are. Well basically they are the terms that people use to search and can be any number of words from 1 up. It is important to decide which terms you are going to optimize your website for in order to target your campaign. There are several steps to determining which words to use, first you need to get keyword ideas, you then need to know how popular they are and also how competitive. Once you have all this information you will be able to select the best words got your business.

Step One - Keyword Ideas

To get a list of possible keywords follow the above steps:

1. Brainstorm. This is exactly as it sounds. Just sit down with a pen and paper and write down all the things you would use to search for your website or business.

2. Ask Clients. It might be useful to ask existing clients what they would use to search for you. Often you find they will come up with things you never thought about. You can do the same with friends and family as well.

3. Competitor Analysis. Look at the websites and see what they are using for their SEO campaigns. When on a competitors website right click and then select "View Page Source". This will show the code for a website and if you look at the line that meta name "Keywords" you will be able to see what keywords they are using.

4. Use a Keyword Tool. We would recommend using Google's free tool, find this by searching in Google for "keyword tool". The first result you get is the right one. If you put the keywords you already have in the box available Google will give you some alternatives and you can download these all into a spreadsheet.

Step two - Check Popularity

You need to know how popular a keyword is before you decide to optimize for it. Let's suppose you come up with a phrase that is perfect but you find out it is only searched for 5 times a month. What is the point in optimizing for this phrase? You could spend a lot of time and money getting to the top only to find you have no increase in traffic and so no more sales.

In order to check how popular a keyword is use the Google keyword tool that we mentioned in step one. When you search for a keyword in it Google will tell you how many searches there are each month on average and also how many there were in the last month.

Step Three - Check Competitiveness

Once you have determined the keywords that are relevant to your business and have adequate popularity you now need to know how many competitors you have. The easiest way to do this is to Google and to search for your chosen keywords and you will be able to see how many results Google returns for each keyword. This is the competitiveness of your keywords.

Step Four - Selecting Your Keywords

Now that you have a list of possible keywords with their popularity and competitiveness you need to determine which ones you will focus on. This is very simple to do, especially if you have been keeping all your information in a spreadsheet. The idea is that you need to work out the keywords that have the best relationship between popularity and competitiveness. In order to know this you need to calculate the KEI which is done in the following way:

KEI = (P^2)/C

Where P = popularity and C = competitiveness

You now need to select your keywords with the highest KEI. Try and reject any keywords with a KEI of less than 0.1 as these are not worth the time or money. Once you know what you want to optimize for you can begin your campaign and bring more traffic to your website.