One of the most important things that most website owners still fail to do is to optimize their websites for SEO such that it is favored by both users and search engines. Although there are a number of on-page SEO techniques, the most basic of these techniques is the use of SEO keywords. These are words and phrases in your website content that best describes your business and which people are likely to use in order to find you. Search engines also use these keywords to know what your website is all about and to determine whether your content is relevant and useful to the searchers for ranking purposes.

Selecting the best keywords for SEO

While there are various keyword research tools that you can use to come up with your SEO keywords, there are some things that you should keep in mind in order to choose highly-effective keywords for SEO. This is because you will not want to use keywords that will drive just any traffic but the right traffic to your website i.e. those who are looking for your products or services. The following tips should help you in doing that:

• Ensure that the keyword is relevant to your website content. This is to ensure that your visitors find what they are looking for when they search the internet using your keywords.
• Your SEO keyword research should be continuous and not done only once. This is to ensure that you do away with old keywords and replace them with competitive ones.
• Use phrases that are more specific so that you can drive the right visitors to your site
• Avoid using the same keywords as your competitors. The online marketing arena is about standing out and being always ahead of your competitors.
• Use long tail keywords because they have a higher conversion rates
• Avoid using keywords that are very popular because they are highly competitive

Using SEO keywords

After you have found the right keywords to use, you know where to strategically place them in your website and the number of times that you should repeatedly use those keywords. While it is a good SEO practice to incorporate keywords throughout your content, they should not be dropped randomly everywhere. Keyword stuffing is not acceptable to search engines and you are likely to be penalized for doing that. Instead there are areas that you should place your keywords strategically so that they appear naturally and not inserted forcibly. They include:

• Titles and descriptions. The title is the primary means of your website identification by users and it is the place where search engines begin to scan your site for ranking and so it should contain your most important keywords.
• In your content, you need to use your keywords in the headers and sub-headers as well as in the body paragraphs.
• Include keywords in the Image Alt text. While images help search engines to rank your site favorably, it is important to include keywords in the image Alt tags so that the search engines will see it.
• You should also use keywords in your page URLs.
• Repeat keywords but do not stuff your entire site with it.

The right research, selection and use of SEO keywords are the first step towards optimizing your website for SEO. For a full optimization of your website, you can decide to use search marketing services in Chicago so that you always rest assured that your website is optimized and continues to attract the right traffic.