In my last blog about Search Engine Optimization I talked about content being king, and 40% of the SEO equation.  In this blog I’ll talk about keyword selection.

Each page (or blog post) you write for SEO purposes should have a keyword focus.  You want to not only be specific in that selection, but realistic.   If you are a local Pizzeria, you most likely will not rank high for when people search simply for “pizza”.   It’s just too broad a topic, and people have been working to obtain ranking for that keyword for years.

In essence you have to go after the “low hanging fruit”.   Think about terms your customers might actually use when searching for you.    When you find the phrase that brings up your closest competitors websites, you have perhaps found your keyword target.   In the example of a pizzeria, you need to work on ranking for “pizza in charlotte” as it’s a much more specific and narrow target.   This is called a “long-tail keyword”, because it’s more than one word.

Then you want to write your content legitimately using that keyword phrase as often as you reasonably can.   Be genuine and real in your writing.  It might be appropriate to use that phrase, just like that a couple of times on a page.  But if you try to use it 15 times on the page, it won’t read like a human will write, and the search engines will figure it out and you’ll actually get penalized for it.  It’s essentially spamming your keyword in the page.

In my next blog, I’ll go into some of the other technical things which help with SEO.

>> Joshua Pettit is Lead Developer and Project Manager at Sunrise Marketing.  http://www.sunrise-marketing.com/