Selecting the correct keywords can make or break your website. Potential customers search the web for desired sites, and if your website doesn't have the keywords they're looking for, they'll miss you.

Determining keywords is an art; it's best to work backwards. What would a customer search for if they were looking for your site? You literally have to put yourself in the consumer's place and let go of your preconceived notions about what you think your keywords are. You should remember when writing your site that you need to use words that are not only related to your content, but are popular search words as well. This is called keyword optimization, or choosing the most searched keywords related to your content.

Spend some time listing all of the words and phrases that are related to your website content. Get ideas from everyone you can think of and list them all. Visit competitors' sites and see what meta tags they use. After this research, you are ready to develop your own keyword phrases.

There are several sites designed to assist you in keyword optimization. Here are a few of the free ones:-

Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) would have to be the best on the market and helps identify keywords that will help your ranking on search engines. Wordtracker also gives you other keyword combinations that you may have overlooked.  If your really serious about getting good results it's also a good idea to sign up to their paid service, which checks your keywords against all the major search engines.  We recommend the paid service as the results are far superior.  We do this for every site we build.