Ideally, the keywords you select to optimize your site for should be highly relevant to the content your site will contain. Google’s algorithms are extremely effective at weeding out sites that talk a big talk but don’t walk the walk in terms of delivering high quality content to their clients. You see, it is Google’s job to show highly relevant, trustworthy, and quality search results to it’s users. The content you put on your site should reflect that as should the rest of your website.
Do NOT cut corners.
Do NOT take short cuts.
It will only inhibit your Google, Yahoo, and Bing rankings severely in the end.
With that being said, there are ways to determine the best keywords to target your site and your high quality content towards. While there are multiple tools available online for helping you select keywords, I recommend using Google’s External Keyword Tool. It is hard data straight from Google. With a few keywords to start, it will kick out a whole list of relevant keywords for you to consider bidding on or optimizing for, complete with the estimated competition and search volumes both locally and globally.
This is the best place to start. Download the list into an excel spreadsheet and remove any irrelevant keywords. Then, with the remaining list, rank them in descending order from highest global volume to lowest global volume. Once you do this, you will need to gauge which ones are your best investment in time based upon the corresponding competition. A keyword may have a tremendous amount of search volume but be nearly impossible to rank well for (i.e.- Cars), but a keyword with no competition may not have the search volume to be worthwhile. My recommendation is to error on the side of ambition. You will likely be spending A LOT of time optimizing for your site and it is far easier to accept that you have a longer path to travel than to go half as far and find there is no water at your destination.
I always recommend typing those terms into Google and gauging the competition. Are these sites old? Outdated? Or, on the contrary, are they new and fast growing? Your competition will be your company over the next several months as you battle to become #1. Watch them. Study them. Befriend them. Crush them.
