how do you go about selecting your keywords?

Selecting and finding those keywords is the most important part of website development
if your ultimate goal is to drive targeted search engine traffic to your site. I guarantee if
you do not spend some time on this step you will fail in your marketing efforts. Your
GOOD keywords are the basis on which all of your search engine traffic will come from.
Since this is your site you may think you know what keywords and phrases people will
use when searching for the information your site has. Most webmasters are usually quite
off the mark in this regard.
As a matter of fact you probably don’t believe me. Do this, write down the top 5
keyword phrases that you think will bring your site traffic. Set this list aside and
compare it with what you finally come up with after you go through the steps outlined
below.

1.) Ask others – forums are great places to ask people questions like this.
Affprogram.info, sitepoint.com, and many of the other popular marketing forums are
great places to go. This is an important step because these are some “real” people that
will be searching for what your website has to offer. After you get some keywords and
phrases put them in a spreadsheet.
2. Expand Your Keywords into a List of Key Phrases
Starting with the obvious keyword build your spreadsheet like this:
Fish
Fish Lures
Fish Lures sales
Fish Lures Sales Pennsylvania
Fish Lures Sales Pennsylvania United States
3. Got to WordTracker.com and take advantage of the free trial.
After you are all signed up enter in your one word keyword. So we would enter in “fish”.
When you actually do the search you are returned a list of keyword phrases. The first
term is the same as the initial keyword you chose followed by a list of additional phrases.
4. Organize and plan the next steps.
You have now built up a sizable list of keywords, phrases, and search terms. Compare
your results with what your polling in step one gave you.
The results you get from word tracker are fact. These are keywords that are actually
used in real searches. Statistics don’t lie. Hopefully they would match what you wrote
down but in reality they are probably much different.
Five to ten keywords or phrases are probably all the workload you want to start off. If
your new at this and try to do more you will probably end just confusing yourself.
5. Prioritize your terms
There is a huge amount of competition for your primary keyword “search” but much less
for the fifth through tenth ranked. Your word tracker results will tell you how popular
each term is and how many searches are carried out for each keyword phrase. You
should note that the amount of searches that word tracker lists doesn’t count Google.
Google usually does about 8 to 10 times more than listed by wordtracker.
It’s unreasonable to expect to get top search position for any very popular search term
as the competition is just too intense. It’s perfectly possible for the last term or one of
the less popular terms and if you are serious about search engine traffic then you should
be able to achieve good results for all of your other keyword phrases.
List your terms in REVERSE order and get to work making content. The reason we
suggest doing them backwards is that you should get good results from the less
searched for terms and this will give you the results you are hoping for.
Ah yes, I omitted to tell you that building traffic is a tedious and time consuming
pastime, but hey! Someone’s got to do it!
6. Putting your keyword phrases to work
This is the content generation part. It’s probably the next most important step.
What do I mean by this?
There are “hotspots” on your pages that search engines look for when they are indexing
your pages.
These hotspots are the page title, the page description and the page heading. By
incorporating your keyword phrase into these hotspots you are telling the search engine
what your page is all about. You still need relevant content. One general rule is that you
should write for people with search engines in mind.
7. Rinse, wash, and repeat for your other keyword phrases.
Keep going through your keyword list and making new pages. Once you have 10 or so
pages you are probably ready to go live.