Choosing the correct keywords for a page and then using them correctly on the page can yield big results when you consider the amount of organic traffic that your site is generating. Choose the right keywords and your site gets lots of traffic from search engines but choose the wrong ones and you may be wasting your time. While you should only be targeting one or two keywords per page, it is important that you choose ones that will work great for you.

Avoid One Word Terms

While you may be able to create a list of one word terms that are important to your business, that is not the way that most people think. The amount of competition on the highest ranking terms makes it very hard to compete well with more established sites. Therefore, the best keywords are usually a short string of words. Case studies show that using a string of words usually delivers more targeted traffic that is interested in your product.

Avoid Broad Terms

Even if the broad term is more than one word, it is a good idea to avoid them because you will not get the targeted traffic that you desire. Untargeted traffic may slow down your site’s loading speed and will not earn you any money.
Let’s consider an example. Pretend for a minute that you are a horse trainer in Abilene, Texas. If you type horse training into Google, then you get more than 500 results. Some of them even from other countries. If you type horse training in Texas into a Google search, then you get still get over 500 results and many of them are unrelated to people wanting to hire a horse trainer in Abilene, Texas. If you type horse training in Abilene, Texas, into Google then it instantly produces a list of sites that are related to what I do for a living. These are people who might actually be looking for the services that you offer as a horse trainer in Abilene, Texas.

Avoid Being Too Specific

The opposite problem can occur as well. You can choose keywords that are too narrow. For example, let’s assume that you are a freelance real estate writer. If you choose the term writer, then Google returns over 11 million results. If you narrow it down to real estate writer, then Google returns just over one million results. If you narrow it down even further to freelance real estate writer, then Google returns 48,000 results. That is actually pretty good odds. If you narrow it down to freelance real estate writer in Abilene, Texas, then there is only one, but consider the number of people who are actually going to search for that term.
Carefully choosing keywords that are specific enough to drive enough traffic to your site is an important step in successful online marketing.