Search Engine Optimization - this guide will help you improve your site's visibility, placement on search engines.

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Keywords - Choosing the Most Relevant

Keywords are the backbone to optimizing your web site for search engine visibility. These are the words that future visitors will use to search in the engines to find your site. Choose wisely.

As a rule of thumb, you should have at minimum eight keywords. Why eight? Well it used to be that Infoseek would not allow one keyword to be within seven words of itself. If it did, it would be disregarded. So if you choose eight keywords, you have a better chance of getting past the seven word distance rule.

Here are some steps to your top eight keywords:

Brainstorm Session - write down every word that comes to mind when thinking of your web site's top, business, industry, it's buyers and/or future visitors (include the incorrect spellings of commonly misspelled words).
Check your list against real online search results using one of the following methods:
- Visit Overture.com, click to 'List Your Site', click 'Self Serve', find and then click 'Search Term Suggestion Tool' link. Type in the words from your brainstorm session to see how many visitors searched on those keywords the month prior.
- Download Good Keywords Professional and find the same information from Overture.com in option one along with 7Search, Lycos, Direct Hits, and much more.
Throw out any "Stop Words". Click here for a list of "Stop Words" as listed on the Princeton web site.
Use the numbers from the real online search results to determine which keywords make the eight and then rank them one through eight (one being the most searched word).