Welcome to part four in this search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of the structure of your website and the best practices for creating an easily spidered and easily read site. In part four we will discuss content optimization.

This is perhaps the single most important aspect of ranking your website highly on the search engines. While all of the factors covered in this series will help get your website into the top positions, it is your content that will sell your product or service and it is your content that the search engines will be reading when they take their “snapshot” of your site and determine where it should be placed in relation to the other billions of pages on the Internet.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are: Keyword Selection

Content

Site Structure

Optimization

Internal Linking

Human Testing

Submissions

Link Building

Monitoring

The Extras

Step Four – Content Optimization

There are aspects of the optimization process that gain and lose importance. Content optimization is no exception to this. Through the many algorithm changes that take place each year, the weight given to the content on your pages rises and falls. Currently incoming links appear to supply greater advantage than well-written and optimized content. So why are we taking an entire article in this series to focus on the content optimization?

The goal for anyone following this series is to build and optimize a website that will rank well on the major search engines and, more difficult and far more important, hold those rankings through changes in the search engine algorithms. While currently having a bunch of incoming links from high PageRank sites will do well for you on Google you must consider what will happen to your rankings when the weight given to incoming links drops, or how your website fares on search engines other than Google that don’t place the same emphasis on incoming links.

While there are many characteristics of your content that are in the algorithmic calculations, there are a few that consistently hold relatively high priority and thus will be the focus of this article. These are:

Heading Tags

Special Text (bold, colored, etc.)

Inline Text Links

Keyword Density

Heading Tags

The heading tag (for those who don’t already know) is code used to specify to the visitor and to the search engines what the topic is of your page and/or subsections of it. You have 6 predefined heading tags to work with ranging from

to

. By default these tags appear larger than standard text in a browser and are bold. These aspects can be adjusted using the font tags or by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Due to their abuse by unethical webmasters and SEO’s, the weight given to heading tags is not what it could be however the content between these tags is given increased weight over standard text. There are rules to follow with the use of heading tags that must be adhered to. If you use heading tags irresponsibly you run the risk of having your website penalized for spam even though the abuse may be unintentional.

When using your heading tags try to follow these rules:

Never use the same tag twice on a single page

Try to be concise with your wording

Use heading tags only when appropriate. If bold text will do then go that route

Don’t use CSS to mask heading tags

Never use the same tag twice on a single page. While the

tags holds the greatest weight of the entire heading tags, its purpose is to act as the primary heading of the page. If you use it twice you are obviously not using it to define the main topic of the page. If you need to use another heading tag use the

tag. After that the

tag and so on. Generally I try never to use more than 2 heading tags on a page. Try to be concise with your wording. If you have a 2 keyword phrase that you are trying to target and you make a heading that is 10 words long then your keyword phrase only makes up about 20% of the total verbiage. If you have a 4-word heading on the other hand you would then have a 50% density and increased priority given to the keyword phrase you are targeting.

Use heading tags only when appropriate. If bold text will do then go that route. I have seen sites with heading tags all over the place. If overused the weight of the tags themselves are reduced with decreasing content and “priority” being given to different phrases at various points in the content. If you have so much great content that you feel you need to use many heading tags you should consider dividing the content up into multiple pages, each with its own tag and keyword target possibilities. For the most part, rather than using additional heading tags, bolding the content will suffice. The sizing will be kept the same as your usual text and it will stand out to the reader as part of the text but with added importance.

Don’t use CSS to mask heading tags. This one just drives me nuts and is unnecessary. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) serve many great functions. They can be used to define how a site functions, looks and feels however they can also be used to mislead search engines and visitors alike. Each tags has a default look and feel. It is fine to use CSS to adjust this somewhat to fit how you want your site to look. What is not alright is to adjust the look and feel to mislead search engines. It is a simple enough task to define in CSS that your heading should appear as regular text. Some unethical SEO’s will also then place their style sheet in a folder that is hidden from the search engine spiders. This is secure enough until your competitors look at the cached copy of your page (and they undoubtedly will at some point) see that you have hidden heading tags and report you to the search engines as spamming. It’s an unnecessary risk that you don’t need to take. Use your headings properly and you’ll do just fine.

Special Text

“Special text” (as it is used here) special is any content on your page that is set to stand out from the rest. This includes bold, underlined, colored, highlighted, sizing and italic. This text is given weight higher than standard content and rightfully so. Bold text, for example, is generally used to define sub-headings (see above), or to pull content out on a page to insure the visitor reads it. The same can be said for the other “special text” definitions.

Search engines have thus been programmed to read this as more important than the rest of the content and will give it increased weight. For example, on our homepage we begin the content with “Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning …” and have chosen to bold this text. This serves two purposes. The first is to draw the eye to these words and further reinforce the “brand”. The second purpose (and it should always be the second) is to add weight to the “Search Engine Positioning” portion of the name. It effectively does both.

Reread your content and, if appropriate for BOTH visitors and search engines, use special text when it will help draw the eye to important information and also add weight to your keywords. This does not mean that you should bold every instance of your targeted keywords nor does it mean that you should avoid using special text when it does not involve your keywords. Common sense and a reasonable grasp of sales and marketing techniques should be your guide in establishing what should and should not be drawn out with “special text”.

Inline Text Links

Inline text links are links added right into text in the verbiage of your content. For example, in this article series I may make reference to past articles in the series. Were I to refer to the article on keyword selection, rather than simply making a reference to it as I just have it might be better to write it as, “Were I to refer to the article on keyword selection rather …”

Like special text this serves two purposes. The first is to give the reader a quick and easy way to find the information you are referring to. The second purpose of this technique is to give added weight to this phrase for the page on which the link is located and also to give weight to the target page.

While this point is debatable, there is a relatively commonly held belief that inline text links are given more weight that a text link which stands alone. If we were to think like a search engine this makes sense. If the link occurs within the content area then chances are it is highly relevant to the content itself and the link should be counted with more strength than a link placed in a footer simply to get a spider through the site.

Like “special text” this should only be employed if it helps the visitor navigate your site. An additional benefit to inline text links is that you can help direct your visitors to the pages you want them on. Rather than simply relying on visitors to use your navigation bar as you are hoping they will, with inline text links you can link to the internal pages you are hoping they will get to such as your services page, or product details.

Keyword Density

For those of you who have never heard the term “keyword density” before, it is the percentage of your total content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There is much debate in forums, SEO chat rooms and the like as to what the “optimal” keyword density might be. Estimates seem to range from 3% to 10%.

While I would be the first to admit that logic dictates that indeed there is an optimal keyword density. Knowing that search engines operate on mathematical formulas implies that this aspect of your website must have some magic number associated with it that will give your content the greatest chance of success.

With this in mind there are three points that you should consider:

You do not work for Google or Yahoo! or any of the other major search engines (and if you do you’re not the target audience of this article). You will never know 100% what this “magic number” is.

Even if you did know what the optimal keyword density was today, would you still know it after the next update? Like other aspects of the search engine algorithm, optimal keyword densities change. You will be chasing smoke if you try to constantly have the optimal density and chances are you will hinder your efforts more than help by constantly changing the densities of your site.

The optimal keyword density for one search engine is not the same as it is for another. Chasing the density of one may very well ruin your efforts on another.

So what can you do? Your best bet is to simply place your targeted keyword phrase in your content as often as possible while keeping the content easily readable by a live visitor. Your goal here is not to sell to search engines, it is to sell to people. I have seen sites that have gone so overboard in increasing their keyword density that the content itself reads horribly. If you are simply aware of the phrase that you are targeting while you write your content then chances are you will attain a keyword density somewhere between 3 and 5%. Stay in this range and, provided that the other aspects of the optimization process are in place, you will rank well across many of the search engines.

Also remember when you’re looking over your page that when you’re reading it the targeted phrase may seem to stand out as it’s used more than any other phrase on the page and may even seem like it’s a bit too much. Unless you’ve obviously overdone it (approached the 10% rather than 5% end of the spectrum) it’s alright for this phrase to stand out. This is the phrase that the searcher was searching for. When they see it on the page it will be a reminder to them what they are looking for and seeing it a few times will reinforce that you can help them find the information they need to make the right decision.

Final Notes

In an effort to increase keyword densities, unethical webmasters will often use tactics such as hidden text, extremely small font sizes, and other tactics that basically hide text from a live visitor that they are providing to a search engines. Take this advice, write quality content, word it well and pay close attention to your phrasing and you will do well. Use unethical tactics and your website may rank well in the short term but once one of your competitors realizes what you’re doing you will be reported and your website may very well get penalized. Additionally, if a visitor realizes that you’re simply “tricking” the search engines they may very well decide that you are not the type of company they want to deal with; one that isn’t concerned with integrity but rather one that will use any trick to try to get at their money. Is this the message you want to send?

Welcome to part three in this search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance and considerations that much be made while creating the content that will provide the highest ROI for your optimization efforts. In part three we will discuss the importance of site structure.

While there are numerous factors involved with the search engine algorithms, site structure is certainly of constant importance. Cleaner structures that remove lines of code between your key content and the search engine spiders can mean the difference detween second page and first page rankings.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

1. Keyword Selection
2. Content
3. Site Structure
4. Optimization
5. Internal Linking
6. Human Testing
7. Submissions
8. Link Building
9. Monitoring
10. The Extras

Step Three – Site Structure

Developing the structure of your website is a very important step in its overall optimization. The site structure will dictate how the spiders read your site, what information they gather, what content holds the most weight, how much useless code they must weed through and more. You must structure your website to appeal to the visitor and the spiders.

When developing your website you want to be sure not to create useless code that can confuse spiders and take away from the content of your site. When developing your site I recommend hand coding as the best option however not everyone has the time or the skill to do this so I would suggest Dreamweaver as a great option. (Though the code will not be as clean as hand coding it does not create an over the top amount of extra code like programs such as Front Page do.) The object here is to keep the code as clean as possible! Remember the more code you have the more the spiders must weed through to get to your content, where you want them to be.

A great way to cut down on extra code as well is to use style sheets. You can use style sheets in ways as simple as defining fonts or as advanced as creating tableless designs. There are many ways to use style sheets and the biggest perk to using them is to cut back on the code on any given individual page.

When you are setting up the initial structure of your site you want to be sure that the table structure is laid out in such a way that the spiders can easily and as quickly as possible get to the most important content. A great way to attain this is to create your website using the table structure outlined in my article “Table Structures For Top Search Engine Positioning”. When the spiders visit your site they read through it top to bottom, left to right following the rows and columns. The key to the table structure outlined above is the little empty row. Were this row not there the spiders would read through that first column hitting nothing but images and Alt tags, your navigation, until it would then move onto the next column, your content area. Placing this empty cell in the first row of the main table guides the spiders directly to your content, they hit the empty row and with nothing to read move onto the next column to the right, where you want them. After they have read your content they will then move back to the left in row 2 and read your navigation images and Alt tags, finally they will end the page at your footer, a great place for keyword rich text links. (Internal linking structures will be covered in part 5 of this 10 part series.)

Once you have created the site structure and inserted all of your content you will then begin the basic optimization of your site. In your code you will want to create Meta tags that fit your keyword choice. The two most important Meta tags are the Description tag and the Keyword tag. Your description should highlight your keyword phrase, keeping it focused, to the point and readable. Your keyword tags should also be focused using each keyword a maximum of 3 times in any set. These tags should be customized on each page to fit the specific phrase targeted.

After the Meta tags have been inserted appropriately to fit each page it is important to title each page appropriately. The main targeted phrase should be the focus of the title, keep it simple, focused, to the point, do not bog it down with extra descriptive text, this is not your description, it is your title.

Next move onto Alt tags. Though it is good practice to add Alt tags to all your images the spiders only put weight on those that are contained within links.

These Alt tags allow you to make your images matter. Most main navigation is image based so be sure to add appropriate Alt tags targeting your keywords to this very prominent area of your site. Another great place to add a link along with its Alt tag is in your header image. Linking this image to your URL adds the ability to make the first thing the spiders hit within your tables to at least hold some content that “matters” rather than simply a static image.

H1 tags are also great way to add weight to your content however, use them wisely. You can use any of the H1,2,3,4 tags, the idea being H1 has the most weight, H2 a little less and so on. Do not over use these tags or they will lose their value all together. The correct way to use these is to use them where they actually belong, for example the first line of text on a page, the title. Also, if you are defining your fonts in a style sheet, which you should be, be sure not to abuse these tags. An H1 tag should be defined bigger than an H2, etc.

Utilizing the above tips will create a site structure that is the perfect environment for the spiders, it is clean, focused and easily read. Your site structure is now optimized and ready for the more advanced content optimization elements to come.

Welcome to part two in this search engine positioning series. In part one we covered the importance and tactics for choosing the keywords and keyword phrases that will provide the highest ROI for your optimization efforts. In part two we will discuss how to properly write content for high search engine positioning.

Content is the key to search engine rankings. While there are numerous factors involved with the search engine algorithms, content remains a constant in stable rankings for a number of important reasons.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

1. Keyword Selection
2. Content
3. Site Structure
4. Optimization
5. Internal Linking
6. Human Testing
7. Submissions
8. Link Building
9. Monitoring
10. The Extras

Step Two – The Importance Of Content

There are many aspects of your content that are of key importance to your search engine rankings and for a variety of reasons. That said, they can be broken down into their three main benefits. The three main things you should be targeting with your content are:

1. Unique and well-written. The search engine spiders are looking for unique content and your visitors are looking for well-written content.
2. With articles come links.
3. With quality content comes even more links.

As long as you keep these three main purposes in mind while you are deciding what you want on your website and how it should be worded, you will fill this area nicely.

Unique & Well-Written Content

The importance of unique and well written content cannot be overstated. This is the backbone and purpose of your website’s existence and it deserves the time it will take to create. When you are considering what content you want on your site (or what content should be on your site if this is part of SEO or a redesign) you will want to make a few considerations.

1. What does your audience want to find?
2. Will you have to do additional research?
3. Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

What Does Your Audience Want To Find?

Assessing your potential visitors wants does not require a crystal ball. If you have completed and spent quality hours on Step One of this series, fully researching your keywords, you are already well on your way. Delving into those keywords you will often find hints that will push you in the right direction.

If you have an acne site and you have found a number of people searching for “acne treatment” and “natural acne treatment” and have thus chosen these as your targeted keyword phrases you already understand your visitors current situation and more importantly, their desire. Similarly, if you are a real estate agent and have chosen “los angeles real estate” as your phrase you know more than simply characters strung together and dropped into a search box. You know that you are dealing with people wishing to purchase or sell a home in Los Angeles. In both scenarios you know what your visitors want and, assuming you are already successful in your industry, you know what you have to do to convert that desire into a client.

Now what has to be done is to create solid, compelling content that will both grab your visitor’s attention and at the same time, make them want what you have to offer. This is not the same as selling to them when you have the opportunity to speak to them face-to-face. You are working without the benefit of watching their expressions, speaking to them about their objections, or even understanding whether they are looking for information for a friend or if it is they themselves who require your services.

This leaves you with a lot of room for content. In the online environment you have to deal with every question before they ask it, and make every person feel that you can help them even though you’ve never met.

What does your audience want to find? They want to find a solution to their problem. How do you provide that? By supplying them answers to the questions that they don’t have the opportunity to ask and may not want to give you their email address to find out. FAQ pages are good but often used as sales pages, which is fine so long as you are still providing good content that your visitor isn’t reading as “sales” but rather “solutions”. Perhaps create pages of replies to emails you have received. Perhaps place a related “fact of the day” on your homepage with a link to an archive of facts related to your industry, product and/or business. You might even want to add a blog to your site. Regardless, give your visitor the answers they’re looking for and keep this information updated as you get new information and you will stand a much better chance of keeping that person surfing through your website. The longer you can keep them on your site, the greater the chance that you will build trust and once you’ve got that, you can help them with the solution to their problem.

Will you have to do additional research?

For many business owners the gut instinct to this question is “no”. Of course not, you are an expert right? Well you may be, and so is Professor Stephen Hawking, however my bet would be he still does his research.

No matter how much you know there is always more out there and your visitors are probably well aware of that. If you fail to address all their questions, your visitors may very well leave your site in search of the answer. Once they’ve left your site it becomes other webmasters who now have the opportunity to present the benefits of their products or services.

Find all the information that you can and make sure that you include as much as possible on your site. The additional benefit in doing this is that constant new information on your website will not only keep visitors coming back to find new information but the search engines spiders too. If your site changes often the spiders will pick up on this and will visit you more often. While this by itself will not improve your rankings it does give you an advantage. The more often search engine spiders visit your website the faster changes you make will be picked up. The faster these changes are picked up the quicker you will be able to react to drops in rankings. If you know the spiders visit your site every second day and you drop from #8 to #12 you know that with proper tweaking to your content you may be able to recover that loss in as little as two days.

Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

When you need a doctor do you read a book entitled “Heart Surgery For Dummies” and buy yourself a very sharp knife. Of course you don’t and while your website may not be quite as important as your heart, it is how your company is being perceived online. This perception can be the make-or-break of all your online marketing efforts.

If you are committed to attaining high rankings, to making money online and/or promoting your business through your website, shouldn’t you also be committed to insuring that your conversions are maximized. High search engine positioning is important but so too is converting those visitors once they get to your site. You may be an expert in your field but if that field isn’t writing, and you don’t have a writer on staff, be certain to at least consider hiring one to make sure that your website is conveying the message you want in verbiage that your visitors will understand. Assuming you choose your writer well you will not only have a well-written site but you will also gain the advantage of having an outsider, who is more likely to write for people who aren’t experts, creating your content.

If you feel that you are qualified to write your own content (which you may very well be) be sure to have it proofread by someone from the outside. Find someone (ideally plural) from within your target market and demographic, and have them go through your content giving suggestions and criticism. Don’t take it personally, every change they recommend is earning you extra money. Whether you implement the changes or not you are learning something new about what people will want and expect to see on your site.

With Articles Come Links

Writing content is not just an exercise for your own website. We all know that inbound links to your site help rankings. Additionally, if those links can be ones that provide genuine targeted traffic you’re doing very well.

There are a number of methods for driving traffic to your site with paid advertising, PPC, etc. however one of the most cost-effective methods is to publish articles. Article writing is no simple task however the rewards can be enormous. Articles serve two great purposes:

1. Increased Link Popularity – When you write an article and submit it to other websites to post, they will generally link to your website from the page the article is on. Here’s a completely legitimate, relevant, and quality link to your site.
2. Exposure & Credibility – The added credibility that article writing lends to your business coupled with the added benefit of the visitors who come to your site directly from your article are invaluable.

When it comes to article writing there is little in the way of more effective advertising. You will have to find sources to publish those articles on, but once you’ve done this time-consuming task you can reuse the same list for future articles.

Get those articles on a number of quality resource sites and enjoy watching your stats and your rankings improve.

With Quality Content Comes Even More Links

Yet another benefit that derives from having a website with great content and writing articles is that, with time, your website itself will become a resource. If you provide great information that other people will find useful people will link to it naturally.

With so much emphasis in recent times on reciprocal linking some might think this is the only way to get links at all. Believe it or not there are still webmasters out there who will link to sites for no other reason than they feel their visitors will be interested in it’s content.

Build a good site with quality content, keep it easily navigated and create sections for specific areas (articles for example) and you will find that people will link to your site and may even link to specific articles or your articles index. Perhaps then your articles index is a good page to target an additional keyword phrase.

This is part one of ten in this search engine positioning series. In part one we will outline how to choose the keyword phrases most likely to produce a high ROI for your search engine positioning efforts. Over this ten part series we will go through ten essential elements and steps to optimizing a site. Some steps take a few hours, some may take months depending on the competition, but in the end and if done correctly you will have a well optimized site that will place well and hold it’s positioning.

Of course all website’s fluctuate up and down however well optimized sites will spend more time on the upper end of the rankings than poorly optimized or spammy sites which may see high rankings but which will lose those rankings over time.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

Keyword Selection
Content
Site Structure
Optimization
Internal Linking
Human Testing
Submissions
Link Building
Monitoring
The Extras

Step One – Keyword Selection

Arguably, keyword selection is the single most important stage in the entire optimization process. If you do not choose the correct keyword phrases you will not maximize your ROI on this campaign. I mention ROI and use it as a reminder that keyword selection is not necessarily about looking for the most searched phrases. A profitable optimization is one which produces the greatest return on investment for the time and money that are available to put towards it.

Bigger Is Not Always Better

If you are a web designer in Seattle who has just started your own business, you could make “web design” the targeted keyword phrase for your site as it certainly has the highest number of searches with 707,962 in September 2004 according to the “Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool”. If you have thousands of dollars and many months to dedicate just to attaining those rankings it could be done however, would that be the best use of your time? Alternatively you could target “seattle web site design” with 5,070 searches in September. A Google link check shows the number of links for the top three competitors for the Seattle search had 132, 21, and 47 respectively whereas for “web design” the top three had 18,700, 5,420, and 1,310 incoming links each.

With a good site you would get more work than you could handle with 5,070 searches on Overture alone if you were ranking well on the major search engines. This would clearly provide the highest return on investment for the small business owner who most certainly does not have the time and money available to target “web design” and who wouldn’t have the manpower to take advantage of the rankings even if they were attained.

This is an extreme example however it clearly illustrates that sometimes the phrase with the highest number of searches is not necessarily the best target for your business.

Phrases That Sell

Another consideration you will want to make when choosing your keyword phrases is whether or not they are “buy phrases”. Phrases with a high number of searches that are not “buy phrases” will tend to bring a lot of traffic, however the conversion ratio will be far lower. Should you choose to target “buy phrases” you may not get the same number of visitors however your ratio of visitors to sales will be much higher.

In this example let’s assume you are the marketing director for a well-known accounting company. There will be many choices you can make for your targeted keyword phrase. The top searched phrases in September 2004 that were accounting-related are:

“accounting” with 156,095 searches
“accounting software” with 54,621 searches
“accounting job” with 32,015 searches
“accounting services” with 19,260 searches
“accounting firm” with 13,089 searches Many might go with their gut instinct and attempt to target “accounting”. The problem with this phrase (other than the competition for it) is that the people doing that search are not necessarily even looking for an accounting firm. They may be accounting students, small business owners not interested in hiring an accountant but just looking for tax information, etc. “Accounting software” and “accounting job” are irrelevant, which leaves us with “accounting services” and “accounting firm” as the two main options.

From this point an evaluation of competition should be performed and the pros and cons of making each the primary target should be weighed based on the amount of work it will take to attain the phrase vs. how many searches there are for that phrase.

Often promotions that target multiple “buy phrases” will end up far more successful that those targeting phrases based solely on the number of searches due to the increased conversions and generally decreased competition.

Tools To Use

Armed now with knowledge on how to recognize and choose between different phrases there remains only one question, how do you know which phrases are even searched? Fortunately there are a couple great resources out there to help you find out how many searches are performed for specific phrases. They Are:

The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
A decent tool for researching keyword phrases. It indicates which phrases had the highest numbers of searches on Overture during the previous month. The biggest weakness it has, as far as applying it to the natural search engines, is that Overture counts singular and plural as the same and also corrects misspelling so the totals are all lumped together in this tool whereas on the natural engines they are considered differently.

WordTracker
WordTracker is very similar to Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool except that this tool differentiates between plural and singular searches, does not correct spelling (i.e. it gives the number of searches for misspellings rather than correcting them and giving a total for correct and misspelled words) and gives the results in predicted numbers of searches over all the engines per day rather than just one engine over a month.

They have a great free trial that doesn’t give you as many results but which can be very useful.

When using these tools I recommend beginning with the Overture Search term Suggestion Tool and once you’ve narrowed down your choices, switch to WordTracker to insure that you’re getting the right information in regards to tense (singular vs. plural) and also that the numbers match. Sometimes you will find that the numbers are completely different from each tool. In this event you will have to use your best judgment.

Don’t forget to check misspellings when using WordTracker!

Tips & Tricks

There are no real “tricks” to uncovering the keywords you should target however there are a few tips. A few pointers that will help you maximize your keyword selection:

Think like a layman. Just because you know your industry terms doesn’t mean that everyone does. Don’t just think of the words you use to describe your products/services, think of the words you would use if you knew nothing about it other than the fact that you needed it. You may want to recruit a friend and have them run some searches for you.
Think like an expert. On the other side of the coin, there may be phrases used specifically in your industry that people “in the know” would use to search for your products and/or services. Be sure to look into these phrases. You just may find some hidden gems that no one else has thought to target.
Don’t target too many phrases. Some SEOs and webmasters target dozens and sometimes even hundreds of phrases. The end result, they often miss the ones they most wanted to attain. Keeping yourself and your keyword list focused will keep your site focused. If your site is focused you’ll rank higher for the phrases that will produce the highest return on investment.

Testing

Test your phrases. If there is any debate about whether a search phrase is worth targeting it’s often a good idea to test the conversions through pay-per-click engines . Set up an account with a PPC engine and bid on the phrases that you would like to target.

You have to remember that the PPC engines do not provide for the same amount of traffic as the natural engines. Test the initial phrases, test alternative phrases, and see which produce the best results. Something else to keep in mind is that PPC are not natural engines. If your ROI is not as high on more costly phrases that doesn’t mean they won’t produce the higher return on the natural engines where a top ranking does not cost money per click.

In the end you will have confirmed a solid list of keyword phrases and if the PPC campaign is providing a good return on investment you might as well keep it running and enjoy the “bonus” traffic that it provides.