SEO Explained - Page 4
Selecting your primary keyword phrase

Another useful free tool for doing this can be found here: http://inventory.overture.com which looks like this:
 
Enter each of your words, and then search (you’ll have to do 30 or 40 separate searches) – and Yahoo will return a number representing recent search volumes.

This will tell you how many people searched on the Yahoo search engine in the last month for that term – in our example, 8139.   Don’t get hung up on the numbers, as this process is just about comparing the keywords to each other – so the actual figures aren’t critical (and depending on your geography, it’s likely they are not accurate in terms of how many local people searched on these)….it’s more important to compare each of the 30 – 40 keywords on your list to each other, in order to find the most popular, so using these arbitrary figures is fine in this case.

Write down the number of searches against this word, and the do it again for the next word.   After you’re finished – each of your keywords should have figures for the number of searches conducted.   It should look something like:

Nike Sneakers 1234
Running Shoes 4567
Etc.

This tells you how many people searched on these terms.

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