What keywords do I need?

The keywords you use in your project will depend on what keywords you are targeting for your Web site and how large your Web site is. For the typical user, a set of anywhere from 15 to 500 keywords is usually more than enough. Anything above this is really excessive and could lead to your IP address being banned by some search engines for bandwidth usage.

Target the "Money Keywords".

Targeting keywords that might generate a lead or sale once a year may be a waste of time and resources. Your efforts are better spent on keyword phrases that consistently produce results. For most Web sites this boils down to a group of less than 50 keywords. You can verify this for yourself by analyzing your log files for traffic from search engines that resulted in a lead or a sale.

When selecting your set of target keywords, the first place you should look is at your Web site access log files. This can be an invaluable resource for determining your initial target keywords. If there are no, or very few, leads or sales generated from search engine referrals, you might need to look at your Web site again and make changes. Word Tracker (www.wordtracker.com) is a great resource for finding keywords to target on your Web site when making changes.

If your Web site is new and doesn't have enough traffic yet, you can always use Word Tracker to help you determine what your initial set of target keywords should be. Otherwise, you can use the pages on your Web site to help determine what keywords you should be targeting.

Don't target keywords that can't be found on your Web page.

Search engines are complex text parsers that read content from your Web pages and index them for searching at a later time. Because of this, targeting keywords that are not on your Web pages doesn't make sense.

At the time of this writing, Google does not consider keywords in your meta tag KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION sections as part of your page content. They may use them to score your page, but your page will not be indexed on them. This basically means that stuffing those sections with keywords not on your page will probably only hurt your ranking. That's not to say you shouldn't put keywords there, but you should keep them in line with the content already on your Web page.