Trust 416BC The Small Business Website Experts.

What are keywords?

Keywords are words or phrases you choose to emphasize when creating a web page or article. A keyword could be "dog leash" or more specifically "blue polka dotted dog leash". The more specific your keyword selection, the more likely you will be found on the Internet for that phrase.

For example, the keyword dog leash in google returns around 1.6 million websites, but blue polka dotted dog leash returns a measly 18,000. If you are a small business providing a niche product or service, use that to your advantage! It's easier to get placed higher in search engines for something which less people search for.

Picking the right keywords

When you decide to finally launch your small business website, you want to make sure you chose the right keywords. Don't go for something impossible like insurance which has near 400 million web pages already out there, pick something more specific, like motorcycle insurance quotes in orange county, ca which has only 240,000 results.

You should also do keyword research at a place like Googles keyword tool. If I type "dog leash" I get dozens of suggested keywords and how popular they are. As you can see from the image above (Click it to enlarge) a better keyword to optimize for might be "dog leash leather". It has lower competition and get searched a relatively high amount of times.

Tools

 There are a lot of great tools for keyword research online. Unfortunately they aren't all free like the Google one I linked you to just above. Many of them cost hundreds of dollars, but can do a much more thorough job of finding the right keywords for your site. Heck during the creation of this website, we did days of keyword research, and spent some money on good software. It paid off though, you're here reading this article aren't you!

One of the keyword tools we really like is Market Samurai. They really allow you to go in depth and have some of the top players in the SEO game talking about them. We don't get anything for metioning them either, so don't think we're benefiting from telling you about them.

In the end though, it's not about which software you use to find the perfect keyword, it's about actually doing the research and not just throwing a website online and hoping for the best.