One of the most important things you can do to get free traffic online is to populate your site with the terms that your customers are using to find you.

Planning With Keywords in Mind

Search engines crawl or spider your site and store what they find. Once your site sends clear signals showing what it is all about, you will be found be people searching using keywords you have optimized for.

Unfortunately, these terms are not always what you, as the business owner think they are. The analogy I use is a hot dog cart. Where would you want to put your hot dog cart: in front of people who are full… or starving people?

This is where keyword research becomes important. Keyword research shows you where (the words they use) the starving people are (searching) for what you sell. The Google Keyword Tool is a fine place to start and it can get you going in the right direction. Using the tool is easy. Here’s a video on how to use it.

[mc src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eU6-0W9PTqQ" type="youtube"]Google Keyword Tool[/mc]

It’s labeled as an adwords keyword research tool, but it works just fine for natural search as well. The one serious fault with the tool is that it uses a bar graph to show an estimate of searches. Another free tool that is excellent and has a detailed training program of both text and video training is Market Samurai. Highly Recommended!

So you’ve found keywords and more importantly, keyword phrases… where do you use them?

First — you must have planned to have text on your pages. How much? 200 – 450 words per subject would be ideal.

Second — More is not better in this case. Do not optimize a page for more then 3 keywords and only that many if they are directly related. Our policy is to not go above 2 keyword phrases per page.

There are “on page” places to use keywords: in the Title tag in the html code; in the Meta description tag in the html; in the “H1″ tag on the page; and in the written content, once or twice more.

Keyword research is one of the most time consuming tasks that an SEO company does. It’s an art as well as a science to dig deep and find the intersect point of high traffic, high conversion and least competition.

In Part 4 we will discuss Site Navigation.