By following simple methods listed below, you will be able to determine right mix of keywords and phrases that will generate targeted prospects to your website. Remember that good search terms are ones that are related to your business and have sufficient monthly search traffic.

How to choose best keywords and phrases?

1)Select keywords that represent your company’s “bread and butter.” What products and service lines are most profitable, have strongest sales, and continue to show good market demand. And yes, typically 80/20 rule applies here. 80% of your sales and sales leads are produced by 20% of your keywords and phrases.

2)Look at complementary products and services that people tend to buy that you don’t offer. Often, these keywords generate good prospects and typically have less competition than your primary keywords and phrases.

3)Use online tools to help determine keyword variations and search frequency. The best free programs to use include Overture’s search term suggestion tool - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion and Google’s AdWords suggestion tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/main. 4)Use WordTracker - www.wordtracker.com. For a small fee, you can use this tool to find niche keywords, use thesaurus to find related search terms and determine general monthly search frequency. This is a great tool and worth investment.

In order to further maximize benefits of writing and posting unique articles, it makes good business sense to optimize articles so search engines list URL's associated with those articles on search engine results pages (SERP's). Ideally, you'd like to see your article URL on 1st page of SERP's so you can capitalize on free and targeted traffic from these listings.

So, what type of strategy can be utilized to optimize your articles for search engines?

There's quite a few different ways but here are some tactics that you may want to use:

Article optimization tactic 1: Choose keywords that complement your USP and name your article page accordingly. When choosing keywords that will be central theme of your article, it is necessary to define what your article will be about, who information in article will benefit, and how it will tie into your USP before choosing your keywords. After you've thought through this, then come up with a list of keywords that will be suitable as central them of article.

Next, decide which keywords you will center your article around based on number of searches that keyword gets per day and by assessing how much competition there is for that keyword phrase. Once you have chosen your keyword phrase for article, name your page.

Example: If 'green widgets' is keyword you wish to base your article on, you may want to name your web page 'greenwdgets.htm' or 'greenwdgets.html' or 'greenwdgets.shtml'.

Article optimization tactic 2: Utilize keyword in title tag. Utilize your keywords that you've chosen for your article in title tag of web page.

Example:

Article optimization tactic 3: Utilize keyword in headline tags. Using keywords in headline tags will increase rankings of your web pages.

Ideally you would use keywords as headline, but usually this doesn't look natural.

Keep h tags before and after entire headline.

Example:

Green widgets: We have most affordable and powerful green widget available anywhere, guaranteed!