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Posted by Ryan Holmes

Mike Bradbury of Object Ware Inc. in Atlanta recently released a great article in EntireWEB Weekly on keyword selection for SEO. His article is full of information beneficial to even the most seasoned SEO professional, but it’s written in a way that a newcomer to the art could understand his steps.

Bradbury’s example of an upstate New York shoe store is representative of many of the smaller businesses that are tackling SEO as a viable marketing opportunity right now. SEO is affordable and with more and more potential customers researching their options online before eventual purchase, it is becoming vital for the survival of small- and medium-sized retail businesses.

Bradbury’s most important tip is that you must know your site. SEO professionals are trained, tried and true when it comes to reading websites for valuable keywords, ideas and information, but for those just starting out in this area, it’s sometimes difficult to know what is on your website, where it’s located, and how each page needs to be treated. Knowing what is on your website and what is not, and the best tactic to optimize that site for the right keywords, is truly an exact art.

The first step is always general keyword selection. For any business that’s trying to make a name online, it’s important to keep realistic: ranking first on Google, Yahoo! or MSN for a general keyword like “chocolates” is going to be an incredibly long, arduous journey. Thus, keywords must be narrowed down. Businesses should start by adding modifiers to their more general keywords; Vancouver Chocolates or Organic Dark Chocolate Truffles BC are great ways of narrowing down a big idea to a more manageable size.

This is where it gets more complicated. Now you’ll take your keyword list and you’ll pluck it down into a keyword tool like Google’s. This tool will give you some suggestions as to different variations for your keyword based on searches made for that keyword as well as the content of your website.

Once you’ve created a good keyword list, you must gather the competition. There are a few ways of doing this, some more complicated than others. Try searching one of your keywords up in Google. Below the search bar, in that blue bar across the page, you will see your keywords linked individually, the time the search took, and a ranking number for competition, like so:

Results 1 - 10 of about 25,200 for vancouver dark chocolate organic truffles. (0.25 seconds)

So it’s your task, now, to beat those 25,200 pages and get your page right at the top. Seem like a lot? Try a more general keyword. There are 122,000,000 results for chocolate. And besides, most of those pages won’t be as relevant as yours, so you still have a good chance with targeted keywords.

Bradbury makes some good points here. Really, you don’t need to beat all 25,200 of those pages. You simply need to beat the last one that contains the keywords in its title or anchor text - the text that links to the page. Here’s his guide…

Go to http://www.startlaunch.com/research/.

1. Copy your list of keywords into the box, click “submit”.
2. Click on each link.
3. Find and copy the number of pages that the search engine returns for this query from the top right of the SERPs to a new column next to the corresponding keyword in your keyword list spreadsheet (this is your competition).
4. In another new column, divide the number of competitors by the number of monthly searches for each keyword.
5. Sort the table from low to high (ascending) using that column.

It’s not easy, but that’s the trick. Now… where do you rank?