Keywords 101

As important as keywords are to search results, I would like to point out some key things to consider when managing your keywords.

1. Who is searching? When selecting your keywords, I would first point out that your prospect is probably not thinking the same way that a business owner or sales rep will. There are many tools to identify what words have traffic. Make sure that the keywords selected actually have search traffic. If not you will be paying to optimize for words with no value.
2. How many keywords? While it would seem that the more the merrier, keep in mind that it requires effort to improve rankings. So, the more keywords you select, the greater your expense. Traffic and competition vary greatly between keywords. Finding the right balance of keywords by traffic/competition will give you the traffic that you need. In other words, quality is better than quantity when it comes to keyword selection.
3. Where do you need to rank for traffic? First page is great, but there is so much more to know when looking at ranking. 1^st position will get approximately 40% of the traffic. 2^nd position will drop down to approximately 20%, and 3^rd drops clear down to 10%. The bottom of the page will also get approximately 10%, but the rest of the page will only get about 2%. So first page is great, but the positions that you want are 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 10^th.

Here are a few other helpful videos from Google’s Matt Cutts

What is the ideal keyword density of a page?

Is it better to have keywords in the URL path or filename?

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking