Keyword selection is a humongous topic, there are books with hundreds of pages, websites, numerous expensive tools all dedicated to the art and science of it. In this post we discover some of the basic elements of keyword selection – a beginners introduction. Even if you don’t like the technical aspects of the internet, it is essential to know something about it, so that you can direct people to do it for you on your website.

The internet is all about words. In order for the search engines to bring back particular pieces of information or pages from your website, particular words will need to be used. These are called keywords. Adding these keywords to your site, for the search engines to discover on their regular crawl over the web is essential for it to perform well. When people enter these keywords into the search engine tools, your website will be returned if it has been keyworded well and has had other search engine optimisation performed on it.

As Google is the currently the most popular search engine, your website really needs to be best friends with Google. However, Google makes this difficult for website owners by not publishing their ‘secret’ rules of playing the Google game, so it’s hard to strike up the best relationship without knowing exactly what Google is judging when looking for the top sites.

Appearing on the no. 1 spot on the first page for a particular term is the goal of all serious website marketers, for this spot will result in 55% plus of all the visitors possible for that term clicking onto the website of these savvy marketing gurus.

The top questions that website optimisers need to ask themselves are:

• which words do people type in to find our type of business
• how many people per month or per day are typing those words in
• how many other pages are there that are optimised for those words

There are many tools that can be used to come back with these answers. The SEO expert can then elect to find out more about how much is spent by people who type those words in that niche, other related words, whether the competition have left gaps in their optimisation of their pages

Pages will then need to be optimised by using areas on the page such as:

• the page title tag
• meta description tag
• ‘alt’ tags of images
• image file names

There is also off-page optimisation to take into account too. SEO and the use of keywords is a specialist subject that can take many months to have a full understanding of for effective results. However, when knowledgeable expertise is applied to a site, it can really make a difference in profits.