Effective search engine optimization hinges upon knowing what words or phrases that your potential customers are likely to use to find products or services on search engines. These keywords should be considered the building blocks of any good search engine marketing strategy. The fact is that search engines can bring volumes of highly targeted potential customers to your website, and usually at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.

So how do you determine the best, most effective keywords or key phrases that describe your product or service? Here are several tips that will greatly help in the process of compiling, selecting, and evaluating your SEO keywords and key phrases.

First things first - compile your list. This can be a bit tricky, simply because you know your business intimately. You think you know which words best describe what you do, but chances are, you don’t think like your customers. For this reason, keyword selection should never be strictly an internal project. Ask people outside your organization, especially your customers, what keywords or phrases they would choose. The results you get just might be surprising.

After your initial list is compiled, add variations, plurals and derivations of your keywords to the list. However, hyphens, periods, apostrophes, quotation marks, extra spaces, and other symbols (*, =, +, %, &, @, ") should never be used in keywords or phrases, as they will cause your listing to not appear.

Selecting single keywords or very short phrases rather than lengthy phrases will usually get your website ranked higher on search engines. The reason for this is simple. The longer the key phrase, the less likely it is to be searched. Your best bet is to select a two-word phrase, or at the very most, a three-word phrase. Recent studies show that more people are now using multiple word phrases when using search engines, with the majority of these surfers using two-word phrases.

Now you are ready to fine-tune and evaluate your keyword list. To do this, you should consider two things - popularity and specificity. Software such as Overture and WordTracker are very helpful in gauging the popularity of your keywords and phrases, and will even offer additional keywords and variations. Regarding specificity, you should consider whether any of your chosen keywords or phrases are too broad. For example, if you sell homeowners insurance and the key phrase “insurance companies" is on your list, you really need to be more specific in your description. A much more effective key phrase would be “home insurance companies."

This process of compiling, selecting and evaluating keywords and phrases can be time consuming, but will be well worth it when your website traffic begins to double, then triple, and then … well, you get the idea. The digital world really can be your oyster, you just have to know where to find the pearls. To learn more, visit: ExactSeek