One of the things that many people overlook when building a new website is keywords. I have to admit, I did exactly the same thing myself when I started out. You can build the flashiest, most professional looking site, with great content, but if you don't think about the keywords first you are probably doomed for failure - at least where search engines are concerned.

Visitors from search engines are one of the most targeted types of visitor that you could possibly hope for. If you think about it, these people are actually looking for the information that is on your website. All you have to do is find out which keywords these people are using when they search in Google, Yahoo or MSN and ensure that your web page(s) are optimized for these keywords.

When researching your keywords you need to make sure that you

1. Choose keywords that people are actually searching for. There is no point optimizing your site for keywords that people rarely search on.
2. Choose keywords that are not too highly competitive - unless you're an SEO whiz that is

If you keep these two goals in mind when choosing keywords you will have the best chance possible of rising to the lofty heights of the search engine results pages.

So, what's the best way to do keyword research? I've tried many different tools, but my favorite by far has to be Wordtracker. You can sign up here for a free trial of Wordtracker. This is a good way to try it out, but you are limited to 30 keywords and only 1 search engine in the trial version.

The full version allows you to select unlimited keywords and includes results from 8 different search engines, 3 different directories and 4 different pay per click engines. Wordtracker actually lets you sign up for a 24 hour period, a week, a month or the full year, so the good thing is that if you're on a budget or unsure about signing up for a longer period of time you can just pick the one day option and have a one day marathon of keyword research.

Once you're logged into Wordtracker I recommend using the "Keyword Universe" to brainstorm for keywords. You just need to type in any keywords related to your area of interest in the left hand pane and then use the thesaurus to find related keywords and synonyms. For example if I type in the keywords "internet marketing" Wordtracker returns 300 related keywords including "web site marketing", "promotion", "online marketing" and so on.

If I then click on the keywords that I'm interested one at a time I can see a list of searches that include this keyword phrase. If I click on "web site marketing" Wordtracker returns 118 rows of keywords that include that keyword, for example "web site marketing", "web site marketing strategy", "web site online marketing" and more.

If I like the look of these keywords I can just add them to my virtual basket and continue choosing keywords until I have 100s of keywords. For this example I'll just add the 118 results to my basket and continue on to the third step and click "Competition Analysis".

At the competition analysis phase I'm faced with a number of search engines, directories and pay per click engines to choose from. I can choose a maximum of two search engines, but for speed I normally tend to just go for Google, since it represents 35% of all searches. I can always go back later and look at other search engines if I have a good set of keywords.

So, I select Google and hit the proceed button, then wait for Wordtracker to return the competitive analysis from Google.

Now for the interesting bit…

I now have a table displayed in my browser, with the first 100 keywords from my earlier keyword selection. The keywords are displayed in order of "KEI", which means "Keyword Effectiveness Index" and for each keyword I have the following information:

KEI - this is just a measure to allow you to quickly identify which keywords will give you the best results. Keywords with high KEIs are the best targets as these represent keywords with a combination of a high number of searches and a low amount of competing websites.

Count - This is the number of times that the keyword has appeared in the Wordtracker database

24 Hours - This is the predicted amount of traffic for a single day, for this search engine only (Google in the case of my example)

Competing - This is the number of competing websites for this keyword phrase.

Here's an example of two of the results returned from my "marketing web site" search:

Example 1
"Marketing web site design"
KEI - 54.256
Count - 46
24Hrs - 17
Competing - 39

Example 2
"web site marketing"
KEI - 0.256
Count - 505
24Hrs - 171
Competing - 998000

You can see from these examples that the most popular keyword phrase here is "web site marketing", with approximately 171 searches in Google every 24 hours. However, this keyword phrase has almost a million competing websites, so if you decided to target this you would have a long hard slog to get on the first page of the search results.

In this example, my preference would be to choose the "Marketing web site design" phrase. Although there are 10 times less searches on Google per day for this keyword phrase, there are only 39 competing websites. So the chances are that I can get onto the first page of search results very quickly. I could also combine this keyword phrase with a few others from my research to build up the number of visitors to my site.

I would recommend spending at least a few hours using Wordtracker, brainstorming, choosing keywords and analysing the results. Remember to save all your good keywords.

Once you have your keyword list ensure that add your keywords to

• the page title
• the h1 and h2 tags
• the image alt tags
• the keyword meta tags
• throughout the copy itself

Also make sure that you include the keywords in the anchor text when you are linking to your site from another site.

Going through this exercise of choosing keywords each time you set up a new website or create a new webpage will ensure that you have the best chance of getting targeted search engine traffic to your site.

Sign up here for your Free Wordtracker Trial and download your Free Keyword Research Guide here.