SEO Explained - Page 4
Selecting your primary keyword phrase

Using the Google Keyword tool mentioned in the previous section, review each of the main keywords which match your business or products - focus on the more popular words where a lot of people are searching (ie the tip about sorting by Average Search Volume).  

Choosing 3 or 4 “primary keywords” or important terms

From your list of 30 – 40, I recommend picking between 3 and 5 keyword phrases that are 2 words in length, have a high search volume, and most importantly – that have a high relevance to your business.   So you might choose:

Nike Sneakers
Running Shoes
Nike Shoes

These 3 – 5 phrases are the *main* phrases which you are going to optimise your website for – put these aside, we’ll refer to them as your “primary keywords” through the rest of this document.    The other 25 – 35 phrases are going to be used on a variety of your interior website pages (interior website pages are simply pages on your website, which are not your homepage).

I recommend trying to group those remaining 25 – 35 phrases into groups of 2 – 3 each that share a common theme.   In this way, you can optimise a variety of interior pages to match each of these themes.   Matching the keywords to the interior pages is important….so for instance, if you have a page on your site that relates to orthotic inserts for people who require these in their sneakers – that you consider some keyword research on high volume words relating to podiatry or orthotic inserts that you could optimise that page for.

So selecting keywords is a combination of identifying the highest volume words for your industry, and also considering the content you have on your website and how to most effectively choose the words to match this content.

Should you optimise for a few phrases, one phrase, or lots of phrases?

This is something that you can work on over time, but when starting out the following simple approach can be used:

OK – so now you should have your primary word list, your secondary words – and hopefully you’ve matched  these to each page on your website that you’re going to optimise.   So how do you go about the actual optimisation process?   Lets get into the how:

Page 5 - Optimising your HTML <title> tags