Search Engine Optimization Keyword

One of the worst mistakes that novices make is trying to focus on a single word (like ‘books’) or phrase (like ‘real estate’), and attempt to build a website that will rank well. Extremely general terms such as these are very competitive, difficult for search engines to handle well (in terms of giving good results to searchers), and hardly worth the trouble in the first place.

Let’s imagine that, after spending hundreds of hours tweaking, perfecting, and promoting your site, you managed to get a #1 ranking for “real estate.” Unless you sell real estate of all kinds in every part of the world, a substantial amount of the traffic you’ll get will come from people who are looking for something you don’t have to offer.

Although you may not optimize your site for such keywords, it’s very important that you know what they are, as it applies to your site. As you work through this chapter, make a list of the 5-10 “major” keywords that describe your website. These should be mostly single words (like ‘homes’), with perhaps a couple of commonly-used phrases (like ‘real estate’) mixed in.