When designing websites, most developers understand the need for optimizing their creations for certain keywords. They know full well how important it is that their sites appear in the first few pages (and ideally on the first page) of searches.

To get a high position in the SERPs (search engine result pages), your page/site is judged (by the search engine) on the number and quality of inbound links and the relevancy of its content to the keyword being used. While you have limited ability to influence the inbound links to your site, you do have a great degree of control over your site's content. Your content, and specifically your support of certain keywords, is clearly of great importance.

Your Goal

To ensure that people find your website in the searches, you need to optimize it based on certain keywords/keyphrases. It's a process that requires you to think about the people you wish to attract. What are they like? And more specifically, what keywords will they type into the Google search box?

To optimize a page for a specific keyword/keyphrase, you need to use that keyword in several prime places. Try to get it into the titles and headings, especially those tagged as <h1>. Ideally use black text on a white background. Additionally, it is important that your keyword appear sprinkled lightly throughout the text of your page. And it goes even further than that. Add some paraphrased text and modifications of the actual selected keyword. The search engines have become very sophisticated and want to see good quality, not just a mass of text stuffed with keywords. They can tell the difference.

Keyword Selection

Before you begin creating a website, you should already have decided on two or three keywords that you wish to target. Selecting them wisely is of major importance.

Let's say that you chose "lawn mowers" as your main keyword. Now if you think about it, that is likely to be a frequently used search term and there are probably a lot of pages on the internet that will show up. Today, as I write this article, Google returns 483,000 pages when "lawn mowers" is the search term. That is a lot of competition that you must surpass if you want to be on the first page of the results.

When I change the search term to "electric lawn mowers" the number of returned pages drops dramatically. Only 14,000 webpages are found. That's considerably less competition. If I further qualify my search to "used electric lawn mowers", only nine webpages are found. The obvious conclusion, then, is that if your site can get listed in Google for "used electric lawn mowers" you will definitely appear on the first page.

The problem with "used electric lawn mowers" is that there is the possibility that not many people search for it. Having your webpage in the first page of the SERPs is a good thing, but if no one searches for the keyword, it does you no good.

Keyword Popularity

This brings us to the concept of keyword popularity. A keyword/keyphrase can be popular with searchers. That is, it is frequently used by people doing searches with Google or Yahoo. I would guess, for example, that thousands of people type "lawn mowers" into Google everyday.

Keyword popularity must also be considered in terms of the sites that are found when the keyword is used. We've already seen the hundreds of thousands of pages that are returned for "lawn mowers".

For your website to get traffic, you want to select a keyword that is both popular with searchers and relatively unpopular with other websites. The fewer sites that pop up in a search, the fewer you have to surpass to make it to the first page of results. Remember: if you end up on page 23 of a Google search, no one is ever going to see you.

Summary

Consider both the people searching and the number of websites in competition when you begin the design of a new site. If traffic is a primary concern, and it almost certainly will be, choose a topic that gives you the flexibility to strike a balance between the two types of popularity. To help you find such keywords, use the free SEO tools in www.SiteToolz.net.