1. Know your site inside out - it is important that you go through your site and know exactly what it is offering and also what it is not. This will help you to decide what words relate to the services and products offered by your site.
2. Brainstorming - it is a good idea to sit down with a piece of paper and write down all the words or phrases that you think relate to your business. You can also ask customers, friends and family what they would use to find your business. It is a good idea to look at your main competitors to see what they are using to help you compile your list.
3. Lengthen your list - there are a number of tools available on the internet that will give you keyword options. A favourite of mine is wordtracker, which should help you significantly lengthen your list.
4. Analyse your list - Using a tool like wordtracker you have find out an estimate of the number of searches for each term everyday across the internet. You should also look up the competition for each keyword in the major search engines. This can be done by search for the term in speech marks, the search engine will then only show you sites with the exact term appearing in their site. This is then your competition number.
Once you have the popularity (P) and the competiveness (C) you can calculate the KEI which will show you how useful a keyword is to you.
KEI = (P^2)/C
5. Narrow the List - Once you have done the analysis you will be able to reduce your list down to words that will have the most benefit for you. Firstly we would recommend eliminating any words or phrases that have less than 10 searches per day and any that have a KEI of less than 0.01. Now the hard work starts, you will need to reduce the list down so that the keywords are highly relevant and have a high number of searches and as high a KEI as possible.
Once you have your list you are ready to begin your search engine optimization and get your site seen by as many of your potential customers as possible.
