Selecting the right keywords for your website involves a lot of factors. These include the size of your website, the competition in your market and the current state of your website. Below is a list of helpful tips to keep in mind when you’re researching your keywords.

Tip #1: Don’t slack on research

Researching is probably the most important thing you can do while selecting keywords. Blindly selecting keywords that have high search volumes will probably leave you with no traffic. There are several keyword research tools out there, including Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. But my favorite (free) tool hands down is Google’s Keyword Tool. If you don’t know how to use it, read our short, helpful guide to get you started.

Tip #2: High volume with low competition

Your ultimate goal in keyword research is to find keywords that have high search volume with low competition. This is just a general rule. It doesn’t apply to all markets and is often times a bit hard to do, but conducting the necessary research is vital in understanding this.

Tip #3: Make sure they are relevant to your website

Keyword relevance is incredibly important when selecting your keywords. Search engines have gotten a lot smarter over the years. If your website is strictly about iPods / iTunes and you want to get your website ranking for “free MP3 downloads”, you will undoubtedly have a hard time doing so. Though you may see relevancy between the two, remember that search engines follow complex algorithms to rank your website – not human comprehension. Pick keywords that are highly and (almost) strictly relevant to your website’s content and pages.

Tip #4: Keep keywords within the 3-4 word range

Any lower, it’ll most likely be too competitive and any higher, it’ll have no search volume. According to Hitwise, a search monitoring company, search queries are getting longer year-over-year. Follow this tip fairly loosely and with common sense as there may be exceptions to it (such as tip #2).

Tip #5: Keep your list short and organized

Your list of keywords can get big and messy and will require you make many trims. Save yourself the headache and keep it organized by separating phrases by markets or the pages on your website. I like to organize my keywords by the pages – assigning 2-4 keywords per page depending on the keyword importance compared with the priority/relevancy on the page. You will want your top-notch keyword optimized on your home page, not on your privacy policy.