The first part of your search engine optimization campaign is to research which keywords you want your website to appear under. To get this wrong is a disaster and will undermine the rest of your search engine optimization strategy. If you take the time to get it right your actual optimization will fall into place very easily.

How you choose your keywords

Whats your website about? Whether it provides a product, service or information, the first word that comes to your mind will normally be your starting point. SeoSelfHelp.com is about seo and so this is our starting point. If you are a catering business - catering will be your starting point and if you provide a resource to help people lose weight then weight loss would be your starting point. A common mistake is to see your starting point as the keyword you should immediately target. More often than not what you start with will not be the keywords you target as the competition will normally be too fierce.

If you had a website that sold Elvis Presley Posters then although the first word you would think of may be Elvis Presley this is not the most targeted for your business. Remember, that the search engines aim to match the most relevant websites to every keyword and if you look at the websites on the first page for the keyword phrase " Elvis Presely" you will see that they are comprehensive resources covering every aspect of the singers life.

If you were selling Elvis Presely Posters then you wouldn't be seen as relevant enough to sit at the top for that keyword. Although the people searching for Elvis Presley will be far greater than those searching for Elvis Presley Posters, you will stand much more chance of beating your true competition and will get much greater rewards from choosing the most relevant keyword to your website. Therefore, your main keyword should be "Elvis Presley Posters".

There's a couple of simple rules for choosing keywords:

Don't chase numbers, chase relevancy. One thousand people to your site who are not targeted to what you provide are much less useful than one who is.
If you find a keyword you think you might target, check out the competition on Google. If their Page Rank is above 5 it's super competitive and you're really going to struggle to attain top rankings with a brand new website.

There's free software online that can help you carry out your keyword research. For our project we used Overture and entered our main keyword - "seo" into their keyword selector tool (to open the Overture tool click here). Overture then provides a list of related keywords which we can then use to determine which keyword phrase is the most relevant for our website.

We were looking for a phrase that was more targeted to what our site offered. It is obviously related to search engine optimization but as a new site it has no chance of competing in that market. We needed to find a niche that was looking for information through a certain search term that we felt our content matched. Three quarters of the way down we found "SEO help" and we knew we had found our match. SEO Help would now be our primary keyword. We would now look for related keywords on the list which would support our main keyword. We found "SEO Guide", "SEO Tutorial" and "Organic SEO". As SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization we would also include this amongst our secondary keywords to extend our reach. This group of keyword phrases would be our target keywords for our home page.

The best keyword research tools include:

Overture - free but only covers the Overture network

Wordtracker - advanced version with a small fee

Keyword Country - the best niche keyword finder

What happens if you choose the wrong Keywords?

If you choose too wide (as with the Elvis Presley example above) your website will not connect with those internet browsers that it should bes. Unless you have a website which really deserves to compete with whats already at the top it will be a waste of time and effort to try and gain high rankings. Remember choose your battleground wisely based on how relevant and valuable you are to the keywords you want to target.

If you choose too narrow this can be just as bad as you will only be reaching a small proportion of your market.

Things to remember:

The aim is to target the keywords most related to what your website offers
The first thing you think of should be your starting point and not necessarily be seen as your end
Once you have your primary keyword, use it to find related keywords
It is these keywords which will thread through every aspect of your seo campaign

Now you have your keywords you have your battleground. The websites that are already on the first page of the search engines for your keywords are now your competitors - the rest of your seo campaign revolves around beating them. We do this by analyzing their search engine optimization, replicating it and then bettering it. By doing this you will be able to jump up the relvancy ladder and compete on page 1.

Go to Step 4 - Analyzing Your Competitors SEO Strategy

SEO Self Help recommends SEO Elite for successful search engine optimization campaigns.