The action taken to pick keywords – picking the right keywords and phrases and ensuring a proper mix of different types of keywords – influences, to a great extent, the success of  a website positioning and optimization strategy. In fact, the search engine optimization (SEO) process for the website starts with the vital step of picking the keywords that people will likely enter while searching for the types of products or services offered on the website.

Keywords may be of various types. One classification may be single-word, multiple-word, and theme-based keywords. Another may be in terms of the type of search they predominantly support depending on how potential customers key in their search terms i.e. broad-match, phrase-match, exact-match, or negative match. Still another may be a target-market specific classification such as ‘business-specific’, ‘service-specific’, ‘geographic’ or ‘general’ keywords.

Pick keywords with the aim of generating adequate volume of qualified traffic; helping visitors in their buying-decision process; and finally, helping to convert prospects to customers. Generally, keywords selected should a judicious mix to take care of broad-match (usually single-word) and phrase-match or exact-match (usually keyword phrases) searches; the former to generate traffic and the latter to filter and channelize quality traffic. Picking ‘business-specific’ or ‘service-specific’ keywords, when applicable, help facilitate the visitor’s buying decision while ‘power’ or ‘action’ words, such as, say, ‘buy now’ used in keyword phrases can help conversions. ‘Geographic’ keywords can also be very useful for websites (and online businesses) catering to a localized or geographically delineated market. Online keyword research tools can greatly help to effectively pick keywords.

Many people in the SEO world debate on whether or not Meta Tags are dead… well that may be true for the Meta Keyword Tags (for the majority search engines), but not when it comes to Meta Descriptions.

This is one tag you don’t want to forget. Imagine some one searches for your keyword and your page is listed in the top listing… search engines will randomly choose something from your body of text to describe your site, wouldn’t it be better to have a detailed description that will entice a user to click on that link and visit your page? YES of course! especially if you’re giving away something FREE on that page, that could be in the description.

Another great thing about Meta Description tags is that, unlike the Meta Keyword tag, search engines will consider keywords written in the description to describe your site. This will obviously give you better rankings for those keywords. Also, when your site comes up in the results, many search engines will bold the keywords in your description and title, thus catching the user’s attention, resulting in better click-through rates.

Make sure your description isn’t TOO long (typically 200 characters will do), and also reads well to the user (don’t JAM it full of keywords! it has to make sense!).