One of the biggest problems facing new website owners when they actually choose to try and take a look at what SEO can do for them is that there are so many companies competing in the SEO market it's hard to get a straight answer on anything. Everyone is trying to carve out their own unique market niche and in doing so they muddy the waters about what needs to be done and when. By the time you've been pitched by a half dozen of them - and believe me they will find you, it's almost impossible to figure out where to start.
The many different SEO service providers will all go about it in different ways. A big part of each presentation will be to demonstrate that they have the best approach - usually presented as the ONLY viable approach and since so few small business owners have any idea what they're talking about, they can pretty much say whatever they want. So you can be told that press releases are all you need, or totally useless, maybe you should blog - or maybe not and now that social networking is enjoying its 15 minutes of fame the companies who specialize in it claim that everything that went before it is now a waste of time. The conflicting input can freeze you in your tracks.
But since you need a place to start, make it keywords. These are the words or the combinations of words that your customers will enter into the search query that " eventually, will lead them to your business. So, what would you type into the search engine if you wanted to buy the product or service you're selling and sorry " it won't be the name of your business. You've probably already given this some thought when you were trying to decide if there was a market demand for your business idea.
Your keywords ( and most will be phrases- not single words) need to be those that people are already using. I've found that if you search carefully you should be able to find a range of phrases from 5,000 maybe if you're lucky up to about 25-30 thousand monthly searches, but be happy with 3-4 phrases per main page that average about 12,000 searches per month each. At the most basic identification of the level of competition for the phrase you'll want to have less that 300,000 pages returned in a search for your keyword phrase and be sure to wrap it in quotation marks when you're doing your estimates.
Different pages in your site need different levels of search volume to be successful. Your biggest phrases - the ones with more than 50,000 monthly searches will probably be for your home page, because your home page is the broadstroke sweep of everything you sell - and lets be honest - it's going to take you a while to get anywhere on the really big searches and competitive terms. But as you look at the categories of products or services you sell- for instance if you're selling patio furniture your categories might be wicker, wood, teak, wrought iron....those more targeted terms will have smaller search volumes and less competition- until you get right down to the products themselves.
There will be a hierarchy of keywords and phrases for your site - hopefully all of them will be buying terms. Going back to patio furniture the first thing that might come to mind is "backyard". But backyard is not a buying term - its so broad that its almost meaningless. But the heirarchy will dictake that the broader the interest of any single page the bigger the main search terms will be and as you move into your site and your information and/or your products become progressively more focussed, so too will the keywords you use to position those pages on the web. Just remember, you're going to have lots of keywords, not 1 or 2, but depending on the size of your site anything from 12 to 40 main phrases and literally dozens of variations and long tails. And if it all looks like too much to keep straigh, just pull back from it for a minute and focus on picking the words page, by page. In spite of saying that you want people to find your site, the don't need to find the whole thing - just one page of it!
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