The wrong keywords bring lookers; the right ones bring willing buyers. Keywords are how search engines index and classify your website. Keywords are at the heart of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Choosing the right keyword phrases for your website is critical to success. The right keywords will bring targeted traffic.

All of your other SEO strategies won't help you at all if you choose the wrong keywords. This is because all these strategies are built on top of the keywords.

So how do you pick the right keywords? You have to think like your customer. People search for solutions to what they need. They look for the product or service that satisfies their need. They do this more often than looking for the person who supplies the service.

If a business owner is looking for help with their business, they search for business consulting rather than a business consultant. A person will search for carpet cleaning much more often then carpet cleaners.

If your products or services are local or regional, be sure to include your state or city within your search phrases. People will search for area codes and zip codes when looking for local suppliers.

To create a list for your websites keywords, start with listing out your companys products and services. Use the language that your customers would use. A frequent mistake is to use language from the industry you are in. People who sell booths for exhibitions refer to them as pop up displays. Yet their customers will search for trade show displays four times more often.

Competitors are a great source of intelligence. Go to your competitors websites and look at what terms or keyword phrases they are using. Look at their keywords Meta Tag, and read through their page text. What specific search terms are being used?

If you currently have a website, analyze how your visitors are finding you.. Look at your website statistics and see what search terms are generating traffic. Most hosting companies provide you the ability to analyze your websites log files. We recommend using a log file analyzer such as AwStats, Webalizer or Urchin. The new Google Analytics are another great tool.

There are a number of good keyword research tools available to help in selecting the right phrases. An excellent one is Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com). Wordtracker has allows you to search a Thesaurus that will list keywords that you may not have considered. They show daily search volume and the number of competing web pages by search engine. There is a charge for this service, but it is well worth it.

There are several free tools available such as Overture (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion) and Google Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/select/main).

Buyer vs. researcher: Is you website an informational website? Then you want to attract researchers. Are you selling a product or service? Then you want to attract buyers. Researchers tend to use general keywords and buyers tend to use very specific keywords.

The Buying Cycle has three phases. Lets show how this can work with someone looking for video games:

1.Research: People gather information to learn what is new, latest trends and what is popular. They are looking to learn and gather information. They will tend to use general terms such as Video Games

2.Shop: In this phase they are comparing and narrowing their choices. They are looking at availability, pricing, shipping, etc. Buyers in this stage reveal their preferences, so more specific keywords (for example, "Video Games Xbox 360") are needed to cover all possible search terms.

3.Buy: Visitors have now decided on what they want and are now looking to purchase. They usually are looking for a specific product or a model number. The keywords you use to attract buyers at this stage are very specific; for example they may search for: "XB360 Call of Duty 2".

Buyers tend to use highly specific phrases as well as singular rather than plural forms. A person looking for new furniture is more likely to type in leather sofa rather than leather sofas

It may be tempting to go after the general high volume keyword, but this usually isnt a good idea. Many times the websites that rank well for the general term are not the ones that actually close the sale. They educate the buyer only to lose the sale to someone else who chose more specific keywords.

More specific keyword phrases almost always have fewer competitors and it is much faster to get top rankings.

Once you choose your keywords, place them strategically and prominently on your web pages. Make sure they are used in a natural way and make good marketing sense. The language you use needs to be action oriented to convince your visitors to buy.

How often should these keywords be looked at? We recommend analyzing your website every 6 months. The markets change, traffic patterns shift and what works today, may not work tomorrow.

This article may be reprinted in its entirety for use in newsletters, websites, article archives and newspapers provided that this resource box is left intact and all links are left active.

Copyright December 2005

Doug Williams is the founder and president of Doug Williams and Associates, LLC. DWA (www.dougwilliams.com) is an Internet marketing and search engine optimization firm. DWA operates a managed linking service Dont Worry About Links at www.dwalink.com.