The selection of which keyword phrases to target when starting your SEO efforts is of paramount importance. If you select the wrong phrases, all your work will yield little to no payout, and SEO work is tedious, time-consuming & difficult.
The following steps will help to guide you through the discovery process that can yield the best terms to begin optimizing for:
Step 1: Brainstorm a List
Although it sounds redundant, simply brainstorming as many phrases as you can think of that relate to your site's offerings is the best way to get started. Try to think narrowly at first - what would a potential customer or user of this site type into a search engine if they wanted to get to us. Ask friends, co-workers, wait staff at a local restaurant - everyone's input will assist you in making the list longer and the longer the initial list, the better your keyword research.
Step 2: Analyze Difficulty
The next step is compiling your list of potential terms and testing them to check for the amount of estimated traffic for each vs. the difficulty of ranking for the particular keyword phrase. I personally recommend using the following for keyword research:
DigitalPoint's Keyword Research Tool - Uses data from both of the tools below
Wordtracker's Keyword Research Website (costs $250+ for 1 year subscription)
Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool - Culled from Overture's database of searches performed at Yahoo!, MSN & others
Then, you should use two systems of analysis for discovering the potential difficulty of ranking for a keyword phrase. The first is the keyword difficulty tool from SEOmoz. The tool's contributors include some of the best keyword research specialists on the web and while the artificial percentage scores are purely for comparison purposes, the competition analysis is an exceptional resource.
The second method for difficulty discovery is a manual comparison of your site against the top ranking sites. Are the sites that rank well-known? Are they large, competitive sites with thousands of relevant backlinks, high PageRank, etc.? Or are they sites that you have the potential to compete against? This common sense approach, combined with the tool's figures should give you an excellent idea of easy or hard a particular keyword will be to rank for.
Step 3: Create a List of Priority Keyword Phrases
By now, you should have 1 or 2 phrases that stand out as the most important and most valuable to target. It is worthwhile to make a mental check to make sure that people who type those keyword phrases will want to buy your product, read your content or visit your site. If you're sure that these searchers are your primary market, you can begin optimization for the terms.
Try to make a list of at least 10 keyword phrases in order of priority (based on difficulty & potential traffic). This list can be as long as 50 keyword phrases if you can find 50 applicable phrases, but 10 will suffice to start. This keyword list should be used to structure your site's topical hierarchy, on-page uses of keywords in titles, texts, etc. and for link-building.
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