How do I choose the right keywords?

From HostBaby Wiki

See the other search engine links in this forum for more info on why meta keywords aren't as important anymore -- but peppering the text of your webpage (especially the front page) with appropriate keywords is of the utmost importance to search engine ranking.

The best tool I'm aware of for checking out how frequently specific terms are searched would be Google's Adwords keyword suggestion tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

For example, if you're selling sock monkey puppets, you put in:

sock monkey

You'll see that 135,000 have searched for sock monkey. Your first instinct would be to focus all your energy on the phrase sock monkey because that's what the most folks are searching under. But the truth is, everyone selling sock monkeys or any sort of sock monkey-related items, are going to be focusing on sock monkey as their keyword. This means that when someone types in sock monkey, you're going to have a VERY hard time being returned anywhere near the top of that search -- people will have to wade through pages and pages of results before they find you, and likely they'll have found something else suitable to their needs before they do, right?

So the better thing to do is look at some of these lesser searched-under, but more specific keyword phrases like:

how to make a sock monkey
sock monkey bedding
sock monkey slippers
sock monkey kit
etc...

and work these into the text of your webpage in multiple places. Because the phrase 'sock monkey bedding' has the words 'sock monkey' in it, and the more often someone clicks on 'sock monkey pattern' and gets taken to your website, the more "relevance" ( http://www.searchengines.com/searchBasics1.html ) you'll have in the search engine's eyes, and the closer to the top of the general 'sock monkey' search you'll be. It's taking the backdoor to the top, but it's far more effective in the long-run.

So spend a good few hours with this tool and search under the keywords you'd liked to be returned under to find more specific ways to incorporate them.

A helpful HostBaby customer also adds:

Also run searches, especially in Google and Yahoo, as they are the number one and two engines, and look at how many pages are returned... you can consider that to be your competition for that particular phrase, all things being relative.

Most people will search with 2 - 3, and more likely 3-5 word phrases because they know that searching for anything less is a shot in the dark.

Also, try to incorporate locality... city, state, county, whatever is relevant, as your visitors may also do that if they are looking for things in their area, and the search engines may use geocoding information to return local results automatically.

While it should go without saying, it didn't used to be and there is still a lot of really bad and detrimental information floating around, but don't try to target keywords that look really popular but have no relevance... the search engines use highly complex and secretive algorithms to analyze pages and sites, so you will probably hurt yourself more than help, and even if you get a ton of visitors for "homemade viagra for emergency situations" they probably will be in a hurry to go somewhere else once they see that you can't help them, so why waste your bandwidth?

Avoid the "submit to 30,000 search engines for $19.95"... actually, even if it is free, avoid it, unless you a)want to get your site placed on some link farm that will do more harm than good, or b)don't feel that you are getting your fair share of SPAM.

Optimizing pages can be taken to very complex levels, far beyond this discussion, but in general, try to filter in the keywords you determine to be a good match and relevant, but not too heavily or you'll appear to be spamming the search engines... turns out, they hate SPAM as much as we do. But, if you can, incorporate them into your pages title tag, heading tags, and towards the beginning and ends of paragraphs... but, focus on delivering good content to your visitors that makes sense and is readable and incorporate these methods when it makes sense. Only target 1-3 keyword phrases to target a page for, in fact the less the better, otherwise you'll diminish the relevancy.

happy optimizing