So how important are the keywords selected for a company's search engine marketing campaign?  Optimization starts with good keyword selection, carefully focused to the conversion goals of the site.  Achieve great rankings for the wrong keywords and it doesn't matter how much traffic your company receives from their SEO campaign because visitors will be leaving the site quickly.  Visitors will not tolerate going to a site only to find that the keywords don't match the content of the site.  Or worse yet, companies find themselves receiving calls/e-mails from the type of potential customers, that are not a good fit or who buy the products with the least margins.  If this is experienced, it may mean selecting new keywords and re-optimization.

So what is the best method for keyword selection?  A great place to start is brainstorming with the client.  Brainstorming should focus on the goals and objectives of the site, matched with how visitors will search and ultimately convert.  Try to identify the type of visitors by demographics, geographics, psychographics, attitudes and behavior of your visitors.  Understanding your visitor first, leads to an understanding of how they?ll search and what keyword phrases they?ll use.  Teenagers certainly don?t search or use the same type of keywords that adults would use. 

Keyword selection based on solving a visitor's problem is also a great avenue for selecting keywords.  If a company sells home alarm systems using keywords such as "prevent burglary" or "protect my home" are problem solving keywords.  Visitors also start searching for goods or services by doing research.  Information pages on your site can bring in visitors at the beginning of their search. If the information provided is of value you have the potential to convert them.  For example, "compare home alarm systems" could be a potentially great keyword for providing information.  This also provides the opportunity for you to highlight the features of your products.

A review should be completed of competitor sites and the client's existing site for keyword ideas.   The client's site should also be reviewed closely to ensure that the site content would support keywords selected.

With a great list of keywords from your client and competitor sites you are ready to use some of the industry keyword tools to evaluate traffic and competition.  Selecting highly competitive keywords is tempting, but remember, these visitors are typically at the beginning of the search cycle and probably aren?t in the buying phase yet.  Selecting a mixture of competitive keywords along with keywords in the tail of search will provide you with traffic at both ends of the search cycle.  The tail of search keywords may not bring as much traffic, but the traffic will certainly be more targeted traffic.

The ideal keywords are those that have the promise of good traffic with a minimal amount of competing pages and that are relevant to the site for conversions.  They are a little harder to find but worth the effort in bringing target traffic to your site.  The methods for completing keyword research are many.  Remember to focus on the visitor and the goals of the site throughout the keyword research to ensure keywords selected ultimately result in conversions.

 For additional information, visit www.vertical-leap.net or download The Business Case For SEO.