Following on from the previous article about optimising your website or blog text, the keywords you choose to focus on are vital to the success of your website.

The wording should not only be relevant to your site, but also relevant to what potential customers are searching for. A good idea is to try and think like your customers. For example, if you sell fishing equipment then words such as ‘rods’, ‘lines’ and ‘bait’ as well as brand names of specific products will regularly be searched for.

Unfortunately there is no way round it; you will have to spend time researching the most popular words. One of the best starting points is very simple; enter a word/phrase into Google and see how many results come up. This will give you a good idea of how much competition there is for that certain phrase; if there are millions of results and the first page is dominated by big players, then it could be too competitive.

Top tips for choosing the best keywords:

•    Understand your customers and think about who you are targeting
•    It’s fine to be creative, but you also need to be choosy
•    Try not to use overly competitive keyword phrases
•    You will need both creativity and persistence

Finally, make sure you use your keywords in your meta data as well as in the titles and copy of each page.

In order for your website or blog to increase its rankings in the search engines, you need to make sure that the words you use are what people are searching for; otherwise known as keywords.

While the design of your website may be impressive, it is useless unless traffic is driven to it. Unless people are actively looking for your company, it will be very hard to find without a good Google ranking. Words play an important part in achieving this.

There are tools to help you decide which keywords to use; the Google Adwords keyword tool, for example, will help you to find the most popular keywords used in relation to searches for your business category. Take these words and insert them into your text. However, don’t simply fill a paragraph with keywords as this will have a negative effect and your website could be classed as spam and therefore ignored by search engines.

The best advice is to use the keywords in your titles and weave them into your text in a natural way. Ultimately, the more pages or blogs you have, the more chance there is of one or more of them getting picked up by the major search engines.

This is a major element of on-site Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), alongside your meta data. SEO can be a minefield if you are unfamiliar with the techniques, but even tackling small tasks at a time will increase the overall ranking of your website.