SEO is something every single website needs, but over the course of the last few months we've noticed a trend that's happening with the different websites that are being submitted to us.  People aren't using the best Keywords for their websites.

Choosing The Right Keywords

Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimization around is an important first step. General or generic keywords are usually not the best approach, and sometimes it's better to be a little more specific and focus on niche keywords relating to your product or service.

Taking time to find out what your competitors keywords are and doing keyword research will do great things to help your rankings.  Down below, you'll see a few of our recommendations.

   1. Targeting a more suitable market
   2. Competing with fewer websites targeting the same keywords
   3. Optimizing for keywords that people actually use when performing searches

Targeting a suitable market will depend on your website, as well as the products and services you offer. Try to be specific with your keywords, and remember that people no longer use single keyword search phrases - the average search phrase contains 3-5 related words.

For example, if you're optimizing for a web development site and you're located in Utah, use keywords such as "web development Utah" or "web development services Utah".

To find out how many websites are competing with your keywords -- either intentionally or not -- simply do a search on Google and note down how many results are returned.  The more sites that are competing for your keywords, the harder it will be to get on the front page.

Alternatively, to get a rough indication of how many people are actually searching for the keywords you want to optimize your site for, use a company like keyword elite or keyword discover.

The search suggestion tools will also provide you with a list of similar keywords, based on the keywords you enter. This can be a great way to find other keywords to optimize your site for.

As a rough guideline, try to optimize every page on your site for a different search phrase. Each search phrase should contain 2 to 3 highly targeted keywords.