One of the most important aspects to consider when starting an SEO campaign is which Web keywords you’re going to select for your website. There are a number of SEO software platforms you can use to help you generate a SEO report to find the right keywords, but let’s look at ways you can find the right keywords without spending money.

Selecting Web keywords is a critical element of search engine marketing. If you do a bad job at selecting the best web keywords to target, all your subsequent efforts will be a waste. So it’s vital to get keyword selection right for the Web.

Benefits of Picking Top Web Keywords

Picking the right keywords for your Web site is often listed as one of the hardest tasks in search engine marketing. As a result, most Web site owners don’t spend enough time picking effective Web keywords, which can prove suicidal since selecting keywords for the Web is one the most important aspect of SEO. If you don’t select keywords your potential customers are searching for, you won’t get found.

Selecting the right Web keywords for search engine keyword optimization results in:

• Drive traffic to your website: To drive searchers to your site, you must identify and optimize for the Web keywords they’re searching for
• Write relevant content: By integrating traffic-driving Web keywords into your site content, you connect with potential customers by being relevant to their interests.

Where Web Keywords Make a Difference

Picking the best performing Web site keywords permeates every aspect of SEO from content strategy, to link building, to how your site content is organized and structures.

When it comes to SEO, the success of your organic search efforts rely greatly on how effective you are at discovering, researching, analyzing and selecting the right Web keywords. Web keywords affect every aspect of your SEO marketing efforts, including:

• Title Tag: Your Web keywords must be included in the title tag, which is the most important SEO element on your website.
• Inbound and Internal Links: Your Web keyword should be part into your link building strategy. Internal links, inbound links and even links in your site navigation should all have your top Web keywords.
• Content strategy: If you want to rank well and connect with searchers, you need to use your target keywords in your content. WordStream for SEO helps combine keyword research with content authoring (just saying…).
• Images: Don’t forget to optimize keywords in the pictures on your website. Target keywords should be used in your image alt attribute and file names, to name a few.
• Meta Description: There’s some debate over whether or not including target keywords in your text snippets helps rankings. But there’s little doubt that having your optimized keywords here produces more clicks in searches, which is optimal.
• URL: Be sure to include keywords for SEO in file name slugs, like I’ve done with this page’s URL. The page is about keyword optimization, so the slug name is /keyword-optimization.
• Site Structure: Keyword optimization is also critical to how you structure and organize your site content. Not only do you need to select the right keywords, but you need to group them hierarchically and order the corresponding pages on your website accordingly.

What to Evaluate When Optimizing Keywords

When determining which keywords to choose for your optimizations efforts, there are a number of factors you should evaluate.

Keyword Popularity – The more popular a keyword is (meaning the more that people search for it), the more traffic it will drive to your website, should you rank highly for it, that is. When it comes to choosing keywords based on popularity, there are two lines of thinking.

• Target the most popular keywords: This seems pretty straightforward. If you want to attract the most visitors to your website, you should optimize for the most searched for keywords. Right? But the more popular a keyword is, the harder it is to rank for.
• Target less competitive keywords: It may seem counter intuitive to go after keywords that aren’t as popular, but for a new website, this is often the best approach. It’s very difficult to compete with mature websites that have achieved trust and authority for the most popular keywords in competitive ranking verticals. So sites that are young typically have more success optimizing for keywords that aren’t that popular or competitive or optimizing your keywords by integrating modifiers (thematic modifiers or geo-targeted modifiers) and creating mid to long tail keywords.

Keyword Relevance – It’s critical to choose keywords to optimize for based on how relevant they are to your products or services. If your keywords are not intrinsically relevant to what you’re offering on your website, the traffic the search engines feed your website will not be delivered a relevant message. Thus, they will be unable to complete the “search and reward cycle.” You see, searchers seek relevance and without it you’re unlikely to convert them into customers.

Keyword Intent – To determine the value of your keywords, you need to identify the intent of the searchers. Which stage are they at in the search cycle? Are they browsing? Are they ready to buy? Or are they simply looking for solutions or pursuing information?

The intent behind keywords or more specifically “search queries” can be broken down into three categories.

• Navigational: company or brand queries, domain queries
• Informational: curiosity, question-oriented, solution-seeking queries
• Transactional: looking to purchase queries

It’s important to optimize for the high intent keywords rather than keywords of low intent. By identifying, classifying and segmenting your high intent keyword groups into separate baskets of intent and eliminating the low-value keywords, you’ll see your search relevance rise and you’ll generate more, qualified traffic.