Not all keywords are created equal

A keyword is usually not a single word, but a term or phrase someone uses at a search engine to find particular web pages. Not all keywords have equal value or bring quality site visitors. Your power keywords are the ones that not only give your pages a great ranking, but bring you the most client conversions.

Choosing the best keywords for your business is not difficult, but it can be a little time consuming. Several hours of research into keywords and their competitiveness. however, can gain your pages a great advantage and is worth the effort.

The first thing you should do is make a list of 20-50 keywords that you believe relate to your business and market. Most people search for real estate services using both a city or area name and a service type, i.e. Boston homes for sale or Alameda County real estate; they usually do not search for just a generic term, like "1031 exchange." Making this list should take you about 30 minutes to an hour.

Once you have your list, you need to research whether the terms you have thought of actually get search traffic. There are several free online tools you can use to find this out: the two recommended are the Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool and the Overture Search Suggestion Tool.

The Digital Point tool shows you search traffic based on searches per day and the Overture tool shows you search traffic per month. The Overture tool gets its data from the Yahoo and Overture advertising network. The Digital Point tool uses both Overture data and also data from Wordtracker, a subscription keyword research service that collects search traffic numbers from Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Neither Wordtracker and Overture search traffic numbers should not be considered concrete data. Keyword searches are done by both website owners checking their rankings, as well as by ordinary searchers. Some competitive keywords may have very inaccurate traffic numbers.

One by one, put your chosen keywords into the keyword tool. You will get results not only for your keyword, but for other related keywords as well. You may find you have terms that have more than 20 searches a day and some of your terms may show little or no use. In the related keywords, you may find terms you had not thought of, but that are beneficial to your business.

You should copy and paste any keywords you want to use on your web pages and their traffic numbers into a document or text file for later use. You can download a copy of our Keyword Tracker Chart to make this easier for you.

After you have looked at all the keywords from your original list, you should have a document file with 50-200 keywords, as well as their daily or monthly search traffic. You now need to find out how much competition you face from other sites for a particular keyword.