<>

Importance of Keywords:
Keywords are possibly the most important aspect of your SEO efforts. While the success and popularity of your website will depend on other factors in the design of your website too, such as images, video and flash content, all these factors come into play once your site actually attracts traffic. This in turn is not possible until you make it possible for internet surfers to find your site. Search engines, when deciding which search results to display, will analyse only text. Therefore it is the words that you use on your webpages, and the places in which you use them, that are the most important aspects of your website design.

Selecting the Right Keywords:
Given the immense importance of keywords, the selection of the right keywords is the most crucial aspect of designing a website. Once you manage to select the right keywords that will match the search queries of most internet users, only then comes the problem of inserting them into the right places. Here are a few tips on selecting the right keywords:
•    Avoid single words like the plague: Most of us as users never go for single words when searching for something in a search engine. It is illogical to expect other users to do this. Go for multi word phrases for the best chances of matching users’ search strings. Also, single word terms are far too broad in meaning and will give you poor quality traffic – not the target market you want to aim at.
•    Avoid very competitive phrases: Competitive phrases are phrases that are commonly used by many websites as keywords. Using very competitive keywords will reduce your chances of being the one site among hundreds that will land on the first page.
•    Do not use unique or technical phrases: Users will usually type everyday language into search engines. Use such terms as your keywords and phrases, instead of going for very unique sounding terms that will be typed by very few people and hence give you very low traffic.
•    Select short phrases that describe exactly what you are offering: Making sure that your keywords describe your product/service exactly is very important, because only then will you get the highest quality, targeted traffic on your website. This is one way to sift out low quality traffic.

Where to Insert Keywords:
SEO using keywords is not simply about the number of keywords inserted; it is more about putting the right words in strategic places. Keywords should be inserted mostly in the following places:
•    All headings
•    Page titles
•    First paragraph
•    The URL (and especially the domain name)
•    Bolded and italicized portions of text
Finally, just remember this: it is important to ensure that your content is keyword rich, but do not get carried away and stuff your text full of keywords that are oddly placed as this is very irritating when a user is trying to look for helpful, relevant content. The importance of keywords cannot be underestimated.