Keywords in Search Engine Optimizing and Search Engine Marketing are the building blocks and foundation of your website on the search engines. If your foundation is weak or poorly put together your webpages won't have much to be based upon for the engines to rank with.

Therefore, careful consideration is of utmost importance when choosing your keywords for your webpages, and so if you choose and target the wrong keywords, all your efforts will be wasted.

When having chosen your keywords, you could be in one of two scenarios: You were able to get a top 10 position in a major search engine and were very excited about the traffic that flooded in, or You got a top 10 ranking, but only a few visitors trickled in to see your site.

Whats happened?

Well, in the first scenario, the person selected a keyword or phrase that was very popular and chose correctly, and lots a people searched on it, rather the other person optimized his/her page for a keyword phrase that not many people searched on, therefore received very little traffic.

So the million dollar question is then: How do you know how to choose the right ones to optimize your website for?

I'll first mention a few ways in which to choose your keywords wisely and then ways to see how popular they are.

1. Think in terms of your customer, put yourself in your customers shoes, what would your customer search for to find you? and 2. Focus your keywords into short, 2 or 3 word phrases (Studies show the majority search for 2 or 3 word phrases)

You can use the above tips in conjunction with the following tools.

http://www.nichebot.com
https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

The above sites will be very useful, in choosing your keywords, so use them to your advantage.

The overture tool, shows the phrase and the number of times a keyword phrase was searched for in the preceding month, while the Google Tool is used for adwords, although I myself and know of others that still use it for general keyword knowledge, and the nichebot site is very useful and a knowledgeable tool for "spotting" the niche words that are being searched for.

Ideally, you want to target keywords and phrases that are searched with some frequency, and that are specific to your Web site, but less competitive, or put another way, think and choose popular keywords that your competitors have overlooked, and which are still popular.

The best thing to try to do is to target multi-word keyword phrases that give you the highest quality leads. For example; if your targeting "software" don't just optimize your page for that word "software" chose a focused niche phrase to target, think in terms of "childrens software" or "educational software",... get the idea?

Think focus?

Also, a small addendum I saw recently on Webposition.com; "...If you take the time to target the RIGHT keywords,[...]you'll be ahead of 99% of the world and you'll be generating more traffic with less effort. Work smarter, not harder is what we always say!"

To sum up,... put yourself in your customers shoes when choosing our keywords, what do you want your customer to search for so they find you online, and input that into a 2 or 3 word phrase, while using the above tools to assist you in this process.