First of all, what exactly are keywords? Keywords are words and/or phrases that people type into search engines when they are searching for something in particular.

Now, how exactly do you determine the best keywords for your website? Of course, you can use real estate, but something tells me you’re going to face a lot of competition: As of today, there are 367,000,000 other websites already using this keyword according to Google and it’s probably not going to be any time soon that your website is going to come up on page 1 of results. Besides, it isn’t really worth your time to try and get ahead with a keyword so general as real estate.

Ok, so now what?

You probably have some specifics about your business that you can bring into your search for keywords. Let’s say you sell luxury real estate in Denver, Colorado. Rather than use real estate, you could use luxury homes Denver for example. (Now, I haven’t tested these words for popularity, but you get the point…) By targeting more specific keywords, you’re more likely to bring a specific target market to your website. As nice as it is to have the whole world that’s looking for real estate come to your website, the customers you really want are the ones that are looking for specifically what you offer.

Beware of using keyword phrases that are too specific. When choosing keywords, you have to think like your prospective customer. What will they be searching for? What words or phrases will they be entering into their search engine when they’re looking for what you have? If you get too specific, you run the risk of using search words that no one will ever type in.

I’ve mentioned this in a prior post, but to help you find keywords that are relevant to your website and business, use this handy tool: http://wordtracker.com. There’s a free trial you can use to try it out.

Use your website analytics

Since you’ve by now added some sort of web analytics to your website, right?? (http://realtyseo.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/analyzing-your-website-traffic/) you can log in and actually see what people are typing in their search engines to get to your website. Cool huh?

Check out your competition

Once you’ve gotten some good keywords to base your website on, type them into Google to see who comes up for these words. If your competitors are coming up, you should definitely go through their websites to see what keywords they’re using throughout their website.

Don’t copy all their keywords though. Remember that you want to find some keywords that they’re NOT using to optimize their websites.

What to do with all these keywords…

There are many more suggestions on how to find the right keywords for your website but I’ll have to save these for another post for fear of this one getting too long.

Stay tuned…..