Choosing the right keywords will determine factor in your search engine promotion ranking. Pick the right ones and you will be laughing all the way to the bank. Choose the wrong ones and you will cry all the way home after closing your bank account.
The first thing you want to do is sit down with a pen and paper and write down every single word that may be related to your product, service or business. Don't take this lightly or brush it off. Your search engine ranking is dependant on your keywords! Let's stick with car website example. What will your customers looking for? What other words are related to cars?
What if I do not sell those items?
That is a good question. Let say someone comes to your site looking for something that has to do with cars, but you don't carry that specific product. The worse scenario is that the customer leaves your site. Best case scenario is that the potential customer sees something else he likes and buys from you and/or he may refer your site to someone else.
Don't limit yourself or your business by thinking, "What do I sell?" You must open up your mind and ask yourself, "What might my customers be looking for?"
Keywords Phrases
I don't know about you, but when I am searching for something on the Net, I usually type in a phrase rather than just one word. Statistically, more people narrow their searches by searching on two or more in combination. So, after you have written up your list, try to combine them into keyword phrases.
Plurals And Longer
In general, choose the longer form of a keyword. The reason is a concept called word stemming. This can often pull in results that are not an exact match for what you searched for, but may be close or the same thing. When a search engine does use stemming or word stems, it means that searches for word roots will also include the variations of that word. For instance, searches for consult would also return documents that have the words consulting and consultants unless the user chooses to do an exact search.
Misspelled
Most people are poor spellers, myself included. Take advantage of this fact and include commonly misspelled keywords into your list. Also, when typing, many people are in such a hurry they accidentally hit the wrong button and misspell words!
Targeted Location
Depending on what your product or service is, where you live may play a very important role in choosing additional keywords. Make sure you also brainstorm some in regards to your state, city and even surrounding cities!
Avoid Skip or Stop
In order to speed up searches and save disk space, most search engines ignore common words like a, an, the, and, of, Internet, web, services, homepage, etc. These are sometimes called "stop" or "skip" words because most search engines will "stop" indexing your page or "skip" that in your title when indexing your site.
If your Web page contains one of these in areas where robot spider looks for copy to index, they may be "skipped" or ignored, possible effecting how you're ranked on that search engine. Sometimes, your site may be placed in a wrong category.
For example, let's say you want your site to be indexed as a "web advertiser". Since "web" is a common, many of the search engines will skip that and index your site under advertising - not "web" advertising.
If you think one of your keywords may be include, simply test it by going to Google and typing it in. If nothing comes up or if millions of pages are registered, chances are you should find another word OR put that in "quotes".
Testing
Now keep your list handy, visit all the major search engines and enter your keywords one by one to see what comes up in the search results list. Study a few of the top pages which will have a similar topic to yours, and see if there are any other good keywords / keyword phrases you could add to your list which you hadn't thought of before.
Look at your competitors title as well as their description to find any new one. You could also look for these keywords by using your browsers "source code" for that Web page and taking a look at the META tags. If you find any word that may be more targeted, simply write them down and add them to your list.
Google search engine is the best way to find your competitor.
