6. Visit Wordtracker. It's a great tool even if it only collects a sampling of actual searches (more than 300 million). You'll get a good sense of how frequently someone may search. Here is their URL: http://www.wordtracker.com

7. Use your intuition. Don't hesitate to try some ideas; Wordtracker and other sources can confirm whether you have a search term people might or might not use.

8. Limit your selection. Come up with a list of words - 10, 20, 30, maybe 50 or more. But don't get so many that you can't manage them all.

9. Tie keywords to site planning. Pick keywords you can work with over time. Make sure you don't plan to drop a page from web site or change it so often that your target keywords may be knocked off or irrelevant every 30 days.

10. Study your log files. Web analytics is a great tool if you want to see how your visitors are searching. Study results and you will come up with a revised set of keywords.

Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, an Ohio SEO firm. A member of SEMPO, he also authored the white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game."

What do we see changing in Google?

The #1 thing we are now seeing more and more is search results listing websites with country specific domain name extensions. Here's what I mean by that....

If you were Google and you wanted to deliver better search results for Canada, how would you go about doing that?

I would look at 2 things:

1) Does domain name end with .ca? (Ex. www.smartads.ca) 2) Does "contact" information about company match country - Street, City, Province/State, Country. Are all of these factors listed within contact page?

These are very important factors, evidenced to fact that, I see Google weighing your "contact" page higher than anything else within your website other than your front page. So moral is, make sure to list EXACTLY where it is that you do business within your contact page. Your website will rank higher for local searching when this technique is utilized.

Second, make sure to buy a domain name(s) that is country specific. If you live in Canada, buy a domain with extension (.ca). If you live in United Kingdom, make sure to buy a domain name with extension (.uk). If you live in US, make sure to buy a domain name with extension (.us).

You may be asking, what if I don't want to concentrate on just local searching? Create a separate website to target different areas. There is nothing with .com, in fact most people automatically type in .com but, if you truly want to target locally, you have to play locally.

The future of search engines is local searching! We are seeing an increasing amount of evidence to sustain this claim. Targeting locally is a great start and will ultimately help you to target internationally later on!

I hope this article helps you out!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article within your newsletter or website as long as entire article remains same, including author information.

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux Smartads Advertising Network

International: http://www.smartads.info Canada: http://www.smartads.ca