These are the words and phrases searchers use, not necessarily the ones you use back at the office when you’re talking with your colleagues. Perhaps you’re a medical professional who bandies about terms such as “myocardial infraction”. The average Web searcher is more likely to seek information on “heart attack”. While in the throes of home renovations, I once spent several weeks conducting search after search for “kitchen cabinet handles”. It was only by accident that I learned the industry that manufactures and sells them refers to them as “pulls.”

Who knew? I didn’t. I just knew I wanted to buy them. In search, that’s ultimately what counts.

Fredrick Marckini, who founded search engine marketing firm iProspect, tells the story of a meeting with a client, a lender, who wanted to be number one in search results for “loans”. He had to explain to them that searchers are more inclined to “borrow” money.

The keywords and phrases that make a site visible to searchers aren’t necessarily the terms you use. They’re the terms that searchers use. Forget about the language used inside your company. Toss out the industry jargon. Instead, embark on a serious keyword research project.

The first step in this process is to simply brainstorm a list of the words and phrases a searcher might use to find your site or business. The trick here is to be specific. Forget broad terms, such as “shoes”. Focus instead on “running shoes” or “wedding shoes” or “Nike running shoes” or “black patent leather high-heeled pumps”. It can be helpful to ask outsiders such as friends, family, clients, or colleagues what terms come to mind.

Once the initial list is in hand, the next step is to determine how useful these terms really are. That’s where keyword research tools come in handy. (A list of free and commercial tools is included in Appendix A, “Resources,” located online at www.informit.com/title/9780789738318.) By running the list of proposed keywords through a keyword research tool, you’ll learn how many searchers are actually conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually took action (for example, purchased the item), and other analytical information. These tools might also make you aware of words not on the list, or synonyms.

This information should narrow down the selections to the final list of keywords for the website. Plug these into a spreadsheet that helps you to visualize at a glance each word or phrase’s search volume, competition, and conversion rate (if there is a history). This list will help narrow your focus and concentrate on the most important terms for your site. Don’t completely eliminate very broad terms such as “shoes”—this helps searchers get a general feel for the site. But it’s the very specific, targeted terms (“pink suede ballerina flats size 7”) that attract the targeted traffic at the bottom of the purchase funnel.

The best keywords contain the following:

Without careful research, you risk landing at the undesirable extremes of keywords. Either the terms will be so broad that you don’t stand a chance of ranking for them in the search engines, and other sites are competing for them, or alternately, the terms are so specific that they’re at the top of the search results—only no one’s searching for them.

Use the final list sparingly. Each page on the site should contain no more than 4–5 keywords. There should be relevant copy around each one, ideally high up on the page. Most search experts agree the keywords should appear in the first 100–200 words on the page.

In addition, use keywords in the following page elements:

Done? Not so fast. Researching and optimizing keywords is a process that changes over time. As a website grows and develops, and products and customer needs change, so must a keyword list evolve over time. Some businesses create keyword calendars to reflect seasonal changes in their business cycle, bringing out Halloween-related keywords in the autumn, or cold- and flu-related terms in the winter months.

As with all aspect of online copy, use keywords wisely, and with a judicious amount of moderation. In SEO, the term keyword density refers to the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a page compared to the total number of words in a page. If keywords appear too often, search engine spiders may assume you’re practicing “keyword stuffing,” and actually reduce that page’s ranking for the relevant keyword(s). Of course, this can only happen when imprudent—or unethical—websites optimize for search engines at the expense of the user. Optimal keyword density is highly debated. Generally speaking, 5 to 8 percent keyword density in body copy is considered good without going overboard. A number of free tools to check keyword density are listed in Appendix A located online at www.informit.com/title/9780789738318. Many of these take the keywords placed in tags and hyperlinks into consideration, as well as the visible text on each page of a site.