Most people who begin a website or who maintain a website don’t realize how important their content is. They don’t hanve any idea of how content affects users or how it affects search engines.
Keywords are the words that people are searching for online and you need to use them on your site. When planning your content, you need to go to http://www.overture.com and try their search term suggestion tool (right now can be found at http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ac/index.jhtml). You put in a keyeword and it will tell you how many times that term was searched 2 months ago. It will also tell you the other most common searched terms that contained your search term or were related to it. It’s a great place to start doing keyword research.
After you have a good idea of the keywords you’re interested in and you know that people are searching for them, go to http://www.wordtracker.com and try your words there. Sometimes overture results are overinflated because often it’s reporting people who are searching for that term just to do seo for it. Take the search term “Utah Real Estate” for example. The search results for it look like this:
12385 utah real estate
1876 st george utah real estate
1193 southern utah real estate
905 park city utah real estate
651 logan utah real estate
620 cedar city utah real estate
510 utah county real estate
489 real estate ogden utah
433 utah division of real estate
407 utah real estate school
395 moab utah real estate
362 real estate in st george utah
362 estate prudential real utah
351 saint george utah real estate
299 hurricane utah real estate
Do you really think that many people are searching for real estate in hurricane on the internet? I don’t think sos. And look at all the southern utah real estate results too. moab real estate? Cedar city real estate? Probably not.
For this reason wordtracker is so important. Their results are not skewed like this. Also, they will give you tons more keywords for you to target (which is a topic for another discussion).
Wordtrackers service isn’t free, although they will provide free results to you, but it’s much less than the paid results.