The most important thing you can do for your business and your website is develop relevantkeywords that are not too competitive yet generate targeted traffic to your website.

It's called keyword optimization. Why is it important?

Because Keywords and keyword phrases do a coupleof things for you:

- With the right keywords, you will attract the viewers most interested in the items or services on your site.

- You will rank higher in the search engines for yourchosen keywords, saving you thousands of dollarsin advertising.

It all starts, however, with the best keywords that pertainto your product or services.

When selecting keywords you should select 1 perhaps2 of the most relevant keywords for each page of yoursite. I suggest using no more than two keywords per page, preferably one.

Why?

Because search engines strive to deliver the most relevant pages for the search term entered. The more focused yourpage is for the search term, the more relevant the search engines will find your page. The more keywords you use,the less focused your page becomes.

How do you find keywords that your target audience will use?

- Think like your readers. Take yourself outside your sitefor a minute and think about how you would find the products or services you are selling.

- Use Overture's Keyword Selector Toolhttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/Type in your most basic keyword and it will show you thevariations of the search term and also the count of how many times that term was entered in the search engine.

- Think of phrases as opposed to one single word. If yousell clay pots, think of keywords such as painted clay pots,or clay flower pots, large clay pots, buy clay pots. Use descriptive words when brainstorming phrases.

- Ask your relatives, kids and friends what they would type in to find your products. You would be amazed at the greatideas that can be generated. For example, I asked a teenager once what he would type in to find shoes online andhe said 'nice kicks'. As of this writing, Overture's keyword selector tool showed a count of 12130. Hmmm, never would have thought of it on my own.

- Use a thesaurus or Webster's dictionary to findsimilar words to your chosen keywords. Consider allforms of the word. For example, for the term supply thereis supply, supplies, supplier, supplying. Thinking of allforms of the word help a great deal in brainstorming keyword ideas.

- If you have a website already, place a search engine on your site. This would be a search engine that you put on your site that searches only your site such ashttp://www.freefind.com/. This will help you collect dataon what keywords users are using. Once you've collected a good list of search terms you can use this to help you determine the best keywords.

Along this same line, you can also use your website server logs to gather information on the keywords used to find yoursite.

Once you've made a list of the best keywords and keywordphrases, you will need to determine which ones are the best.

Your challenge is to find keywords that have a high usage countbut appear on the least amount of competing web pages.

Wordtracker.com is an excellent tool for helping you achieve this. Wordtracker's 'Keyword Effectiveness Index' (KEI) will provide you with the number of times a keyword is used alongwith the number of competing web pages. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition. This means a better chance for you in getting to the top of the search engines.

Finding the best keywords and keyword phrases is an important part of your marketing mix. Find the correct keywords and buildyour content around them.

Elizabeth McGee strives to help webmasters and business ownersfind trusted marketing tools while also offering tips, stragegies and information for online marketing. Sign up for her FREE newsletter by visiting her site at: http://www.pro-marketing-online.com