Keyword selection is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization - in fact, it can make or break your search engine marketing efforts.  While choosing keywords that are accurately reflect your business (and your location, if applicable) is certainly essential, it is important that your keywords also reflect the terms that people use to search for what your company offers.  In other words, keyword research is really market research.  Here are the five steps to keyword greatness:

1.  Choose Your Weapons (a.k.a. Keywords) - Use one of the many excellent keyword suggestion tools to get started, like Google’s keyword tool or Wordtracker.  Examine your results carefully and pick the top three or five that are most appropriate for your business - these will be your main keywords and they should appear in your titles and description tags and such.  You don’t want to go too general - besides the fact that it is difficult to rank for broad terms like “marketing”, you want to target your potential customers more closely.  Someone searching for “marketing” is much less likely to end up converting than someone searching for “search engine marketing firm”, for example.

2.  Check out the Competition - What other websites are highly ranked for your choice of terms?  Are they companies offering similar services?  How many results do the search engines return?  After all, it is a lot easier to rank when your chosen search term returns 50,000 results as opposed to 5 million.  Don’t let yourself be discouraged from selecting very competitive terms if they are truly the best fit for your business, however, be realistic about how quickly you can rank - you aren’t going hit page one overnight for the vast majority of keywords.

3.  Compose Your Content - It is important to place your keywords highly on your homepage and any additional relevant pages; however, keyword stuffing is generally a bad idea - your visitors will find it off-putting and it really has no place on a company website.  Anyways, since your keywords are relevant to your business, you (or your copywriter) should have no problem seeding them naturally throughout your website’s text.

4.  Tag Your Work - If you have a blog, the your keywords should appear in the categories and tags (and if you don’t have a blog, why not?  It is fantastic for search engine optimization purposes.  Even if you don’t have a blog, per se, submitting and tagging your content on the appropriate social media sites - don’t forget about the smaller niche sites - can be a great way to build links and send some targeted traffic your way.

5.  Reevaluate and Readjust - Markets and search engines are constantly changing, and your keywords shouldn’t be static either.  If your business adds a new division or starts offering a new service, change your keywords accordingly - and don’t forget to write and submit an optimized press release while you are at it.