1. Determine your target audience
This step is pretty much straight forward. Understand your Website�s content and who you want to visit your site. If you are a small business and handle mostly local accounts then make sure you target your keywords around the local community.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Who will benefit from visiting my Website? Who do I want to visit my Website? Why will they visit my Website?
2. Think like your customer/client(s)
This is where you have to step away from your expertise and think like an average person. Just because you know the professional term for your service does not mean your customers will. You have to think what keywords the common person would use to find your service or product.
Example:
Your profession might be an "Optometrist", but the average person refers to you as an "Eye Doctor". So when they conduct a search, most likely they will use the key phrase "Eye Doctor" not "Optometrist".
3. Rank the importance of each keyword/phrase(s)
This step relates closely to step 2. You may determine that people will search for you using many different keywords. You should then list the keywords in order of importance, to determine which ones should be used mostly during optimization.
Example:
Eye Doctor Optometrist Eye Exam Glasses Contacts Prescription Floaters
4. Research keywords popularity
There are many FREE tools online that will help you determine the popularity of keywords. This can help you during the keyword ranking process.
Keeyword Popularity Tool
5. Don't be generic
This stage is very important. If you are too generic with your keywords most likely you will not receive the search results you intended. Use a keyword popularity tool to learn what words people use to search with and then add additional keywords that target more to your website.
Examples:
Keywords - Strength (1-10)
Doctor - 2
Eye Doctor - 4
Georgia Eye Doctor - 7
Atlanta Eye Doctor - 10
Keywords - Strength (1-10)
Glasses - 3
Prescription Glasses - 6
Atlanta Prescription Glasses - 8
Atlanta Prescription Sunglasses - 10
Keywords - Strength (1-10)
Restaurant - 2
Italian Restaurant - 5
Atlanta Italian Restaurant - 10
This is why it is important to know your target audience. What good would it do if someone from New York visited your Atlanta base Eye Doctor Website?
6. Make sure keywords are relevant to the page's content
Search engines look at more than just keywords when determining search results. They also look at the pages content as well as the alt tags. You could have picked the perfect keywords but if it is not relevant to your page's content, you will not receive good search results. Even if someone finds your page from those keywords, they are going to leave right away because it has nothing to do with what they are looking for.
7. Target each page with their own set of keywords
This is where the relevance comes in hand. You only want to drive positive traffic to your site that can benefit your company. By targeting a different set of keywords for each page you can stretch the amount of keywords used throughout your website and target a larger audience. You have a better chance of returning higher rankings by focusing a particular page to a particular set of keywords. That way the keywords are not as broad and more relevant to the page's content, search engines love that.
Example:
If you have a page talking about different eye examinations you conduct, do not use prescription glasses as keywords. You should use �eye examinations� and other types of eye examinations you conduct as the keywords.
Conclusion:
Picking the correct keywords is a hard task. There is no correct way to do it, but there are a lot of wrong practices. This is the strategy that I use and have learned to be the most effective. I hope this helps.