Choosing the right keywords is one of the basic and most important optimization techniques. You can gain enormous leverage if going for right words. This process is not as easy and quick as it seems. There is serious research and some calculation needed. Luckily Google has very useful tool to facilitate this task. Best advice for new sites is not to go for those with big competition, but to aim for so-called long tail keywords. For example if your online store sells knives, you should promote your site for keywords like: kitchen knives, stainless steel knives, fixed blade knives… catch my drift? Another useful thing would be to add your city or state name for optimization. This way customer who will search for “kitchen knives in Arizona” will get to your pages.
The ratio between search results amount and monthly searches for is extremely important. Naturally you should go for those who have greater monthly volume search and fewer search results. There is no point in fighting your way up through millions of other sites for 1 keyword while you can get more visitors in shorter period of time if you target right words. This optimization will save you a lot of time and money right from the start. Check out example from real case; one of my customers is running christian jewelry store with items like rings, bracelets, crosses, crucifix, earrings and many more. While doing research for him I found perfect example that illustrates the point I try to make here:
Compare the numbers for highlighted options. Christian Jewelry has pretty big competition with 22,200 monthly searches, while Christian Cross have much less competition with greater search volumes – 27,100 !
Another essential issue is keyword density. Stuffing your text repeatedly will do you no good, exactly the opposite. What SE (search engines) are looking for is natural, unique text and not something like “buy our knives, because these knives are top quality knives“. Nobody in his right mind would write something like this unless he tries to trick SE, so they will punish you for this kind of spamming.
Choosing the right Title for your page is crucial! While this is the easiest thing to do, many people make mistake by stuffing it with keywords and long description. You should choose short phrase (~5 words) that characterize what this page is about and that’s it. Don’t forget that not only SE checks your title. People don’t have patience to read wrong titles while browsing search results, so make it short and objective.