Targeted traffic and search engine traffic are
directed to your website based on keywords.
Proper selection of keywords is important
to your website's success. 

Tips for Selecting Your Best Keywords

Why are keywords so important to your website's success? Because they bring qualified buyers to your site as people look for your products and services through search engines. Careful selection and placement of the best keywords within your page copy and HTML meta tags goes a long ways in providing you with visitors that translate into sales. Here are some tips in generating keywords and phrases that will boost your traffic flow.  Keyword marketing is an important part of bid management with pay per click search engines.

1. Put yourself in your customer's shoes.
What words and phrases would your target market use to find your offerings.  Get ideas and feedback from your current customers, clients, suppliers, and associates. What would your potential customer be looking for?

2. Use "Good Keywords" software.
Download your free copy of Good Keywords.  This tool provides you with keyword searches in the top search engines.  This also tells you how many times that keyword or phrase was requested within the last month.  It also will pull up the page within that engine so  you can see what your competition is doing.

3. Other Keyword online sources.
Wordtracker provides a fantastic service that pinpoints specific keywords to your website.  Many times they can provide you with keywords that come from "outside the box", those keywords and phrases that you might not come up with because of your closeness to the project. WordTracker's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) will tell you the number of times your keyword appears in its database and the number of competing Web pages. Look for keywords that might work on your pages. A high KEI means the word is more popular and less competitive. A KEI of 100 is fairly good, but anything over 400 is super. Use only the keywords that describe your offerings.
Try Google's associated keyword search.  

4. Expand your keywords into a list of key phrases.
After building your initial keyword list, start putting together phrases.  The majority of search engine searches are made with keyword phrases.  The more specific your keyword phrases, the greater chance your site will have exactly what your visitor is looking for.

5. Create variations of your keyword phrases..
Change the order of your words to create differant combinations. Create phrases that ask a question.  Include synonyms, metaphors, brand names, and common misspellings. (another useful tool of WordTracker). Use qualifiers to create very specific combinations.

6. Use Magic words.
Utilize words that sell when developing your keyword phrases.

7. If you are Marketing a Brand Name - Include the Brand Name.
It pays to include your company name in your keyword phrases if you're a well known brand. If you are an affiliate for Dell Computers, include Dell within your keyword phrases.  Do a search of your brand name with the Good Keywords tool and you will see how often the brand name is included within the search.

8. Use Geographic Location.
If you market to a specific geographic area like a city, state or country, then include this within your keyword phrases.  

9. Check up on your competition..
Perform a Google or MSN search on a competitors site and view the page source for keywords.  This could provide you with some keywords you may have missed.  Don't copy your competitor's keyword list and use it as your own, because you do not know how and why these specific words were chosen.  You need to generate your own.

10. Don't Use Keywords or Phrases That Are Too Broad.
Add specificity to your keywords by adding modifiers or adjectives. Targeting your niche with specific keywords provides your site with highly motivated visitors.  The goal is targeted traffic that will come to your website hoping it solves their specific need.  The goal is not tons of non-targeted traffic that could care less what you are marketing.

11. Incorporate your Keywords within your page copy.
By now you should have come up with a highly targeted list of keywords and keyword phrases. It is very important that you include these words within your titles, headings, alt text, and page copy in order for the search engines see a relevance between your HTML meta tags and your actual text. A great tool for performing a word count on any text or html file is AS Keyword Generator

Use the above strategies when developing your site.  Emphasizing your keywords within your page copy as well as including them within your HTML meta tags, will go a long way in achieving favorable search engine listings. Take the time to do it right and you will be rewarded.

WebPosition Gold
At a minimum the meta tags as explained below should be utilized.  The problem with search engines is that each search engine has different requirements.  What might give you a top listing with one search engine would put you at the bottom of another search engine.  The answer is search engine software that continually updates and submits your pages individually to each search engines requirements.   WebPosition Gold software that takes care of this tedious chore.  High positioning results and enormous time savings make this product one of the most important website promotion tools you can have. More Information

Meta-tag Generator 
You can hand code your HTML meta tags into your website coding, but a more efficient method is to utilize software designed specifically for this task.  Properly built meta tags are an integral part of any properly built website.  Ace Bot Meta Tag Generator provides you with up to 15 different meta tags in a application that allows you to apply the meta tags,  whether on your computer or on your website's server.  Ace Bot Meta Tag Generator