Hi,
(new to the forums, but not to SEO)
Head over to
adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Run some searches for terms that target customers / users might use to find your website.
Organise the results by most popular first. Also keep in mind the "competition" level as this often indicates where the 'money' terms are as advertisers are bidding on those phrases.
You then want to think about how your site is laid out. Ideally, if you have a few products / services you would have an individual section for each.
You want to then associate key 'phrases' with each of those sections.
The keyword tag is not really used these days, but the description and title are so those are the two to look at closely.
For example:
I have a site of widgets.com/blue-widget.html
I might put a title tag of "Blue Widgets Online - Buy your blue widgets from widgets.com"
A description of "Blue widgets available. All sizes of blue widgets for sale online in our blue widget store".
The point is that rather than trying to include lots of keywords that would "dilute" the subject matter of the page, you want to choose 3 or so key 'phrases' that include the terms you are aiming for so that the page is highly targetted towards those.
You would then look to match up the content of the page / section to use those similar phrases where applicable. Even simple changes like making "buying our widgets is simple" to "buying our blue widgets online is simple". It wont upset the user, but it lets the search engines understand what you are trying to do with the page and the content.
Search engines are far along from just keywords these days. They take into account the 'theme' of the page, the site, the sites linked to and the sites link from. They can also semantically understand other words and phrases that mean the same or similar things. For example, they would understand that "childrens books" and "childrens reading materials" are of the same 'theme' and thus relevant to the content in use.
So in short
- think about 'phrases' rather than 'words'
- Research the popular terms that have converting traffic (there are other tools out there such as webceo and wordtracker)
- focus on optimising pages / sections for phrases rather than an entire site for lots of phrases / a single phrase
- Remember that you are trying to bring a user in to the best place on your site they could be for the item they are searching for. This helps with conversions too as it means they don't have to 'dig' for the information once they arrive.
- make sure you test, alter and refine. Sometimes something as simple as putting a singular at the front instead of a plural can make those extra few positions difference.
I hope that helps. I tried to make my first post here be something useful rather than just a hello.... as such I hope it helps you and / or others as a result
Cheers,
Sunny