Finding a set of keywords that best fits your site can be a challenging feat. In most cases finding the right keywords is a matter of trial and error, and may take some time to weed out words and phrases that are doing your site no good.

Relevance

Make sure the keywords are relevant to what content you will be displaying. If the site is selling shoes using keywords that relate to shoes, such as brand names and types of shoes would be fine. Unless the page contained content about exercise and dieting, adding ‘Atkins Diet’ or ‘South Beach Diet’ would probably not be appropriate.

Competition

A good way to get a feel for what your keywords should be is taking a peek at your competitions keywords. Open their site and observe what they are using for their page titles, Meta tags and specially formatted text.

Sub Pages

The last thing I will cover is keywords for sub pages. You should have keywords in mind not just for the site in general but for all sections throughout your site. Keep in mind that each page has its own chance of ranking in a search engine.

Pages under a section that is trying to sell a product or service should use keywords that are more focused on selling; ‘Affordable’, ‘discount’, ‘low price’.

In summary:

• Make sure the keywords are relevant to the content on the page
• Get ideas by checking similar sites
• Put together a list of specific and non-specific keywords that can be applied to sub pages.