How To Choose Keywords for a Website

A website is practically useless if people don't know it exists. You can spend a large amount of time and money to promote your website through traditional advertising or through word of mouth, but nothing beats natural discovery of your site via the search engines. People around the world use search engines to look for helpful information. They search for information based on keywords that they feed to the search engines. If your website is optimized with top-ranking keywords, your website will most likely generate heavy traffic if the search engine reports your site on the top of the list of sites for a particular keyword.

That is how crucial keyword choice is when building a website. As a matter of fact, every website developer knows that keyword choice is one of the first important steps in optimizing a website for search engines. By optimizing your site is meant the process of making your site more easily found by users via the search engines such as Google.

How, then, do you choose keywords for a website? There are several ways. The most logical and most natural way is to simply come up with words that you think other people will use to search for the information on your site via the search engines. Read the rest of this article for more tips and ideas on how to choose keywords for a website.

* Know who your expected audience is. More importantly, understand your intended audience and try to relate it to the primary focus of your website. Your understanding of your audience will benefit you much in choosing the best keywords for your website.

* On your own or with a team, brainstorm on several words and phrases that people may potentially feed to the search engines when looking for sites such as yours that provide the searchers with the information they need. Think of generic or broad keyword directly related to your site's content, as well as more specific keywords. For example, if your site is about coffee, don't just stop at "coffee." Also include, "coffee mug," "coffee beans," "ground coffee," and so on. These phrases are different from one another but related to one another.
* Use a keyword suggestion or keyword research tool online. Feed the primary keywords to the online tool. You will be presented with a long list of other keywords related to the ones you feed to the online tool. Go through this long list and strike off those words and phrases that do not describe your site's content at all. Narrow down the long list to no more than 30 words and phrases.


Make sure that each page on your website has, at the very most, three keyword phrases that are directly related to your site. Your keywords should be sprinkled all over your site's pages, but they have to sound natural and sensible, otherwise you might be accused of keyword padding. Make sure that for each page on your site, your primary keywords should not constitute more than 2% of the total number of words on the page. Anything in excess of 2% might risk you for keyword padding, which search engines hardly like at all.