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In this article, I'm going to give you a step by step method that you can use to choose the right keywords to promote your website, or to modify your website to use your keywords to their maximum potential.

I' m to going to keep this short and sweet - so you can use this article as a reference point and look back at it again and again.

So - why do you need to do this? Well, presumably you want your potential visitors to be able to find your website in the search engines. In order for anyone to be able to find your website in search engines such as Google - you need to first spend some time thinking about how your target audience is going to actually search for your website. What I mean by that is:

1) Imagine you are your audience - what would you type into Google to search for the things you are offering?

Example:

I sell used cars and I have a used car garage. My target audience may go to Google and type in "used cars", or they may type in "cheap used cars". I'll list a few more I just thought of:

cheap used ford cars

second hand car for sale

second hand motors

cheap used cars

Okay - so you've got a list. Now you're going to have to narrow that down.

2) Remove any keywords that are repeated. You don't need to keep "used cars" and "cheap used cars" because "used cars" is contained within "cheap used cars". This is actually a very overlooked point - you can 'nest' keyword. Remember, by doing this you are getting 2 keywords for the price of 1!

Now as far as meta tags go - you should use them. Don't listen to anyone who tells you they're not 'seen' by Google anymore - these people don't know what they are talking about. Your keywords tag shouldn't have more than 10 keyphrases in it. Not words - yes phrases.

3) Your keywords meta tag should contain a list of keywords that looks like this:

"cheap used ford cars,second hand car for sale,second hand motors,cheap used cars"

It should not look like this:

"cheap,used,ford,cars,second,hand,car,for,sale,second hand motors,cheap,used,cars"

Trust me I've seen it done - and all it does is waste your keyword count while at the same time losing and niche phrases that you may benefit from.

4) Now you've chosen your top 10 phrases - you need to make sure that your website actually uses those phrases appropriately.

That doesn't mean that you should write these phrases all over the place like a loony.

You need to use them in your titles, that is meta titles, h tags and links within your site. Make sure your hyperlinks on your site that link to your own pages have these keywords in them (internal links).

Now in this lesson I've just covered the basics of a simple link strategy. In reality you will want to repeat this for every page in your site. You don't want to optimise every page the same way because obviously every page has or should have totally different content.

5) After you have done this - you can go to the next stage - Looking for linkbacks. Start contacting other website owners and ask them to place a link to your website on their site. This is a lot easier said than done - but it's one of the most important things you need to do. Without quite a lot of links pointing back to you, your site will never - yes NEVER be in Google's top results. Think about that!

A good way to start getting some inbound links pointing back to your website is to register your site on some of the many free business listing sites that can be found on the net such as The City Web Guide ( free business listings in Australia ), The Free Index and Yahoo Local. Many of these sites will list your business and include a link to your site, working wonders for your SEO.