With more and more businesses doing business online, it's more important than ever to choose the right keywords for your business, and therefore to target and attract the right prospects to your site. There are many aspects to mounting a successful search engine campaign, but none of them will matter if you are targeting the wrong customers with poorly chosen keywords.

Be Specific!

You might think that if you were selling cars, then optimizing for the keyword, "cars" would provide the most visitors, and therefore the best results. Wrong! Typing "cars" into a search engine will return so many unrelated sites as to almost be useless for a visitor searching for any type of specific info. If the user is looking to buy a car, the search for "cars" will bring up sites relating to car insurance, car accident reports, car building hobby sites, historical cars, reviews on new and used cars, etc., etc.

To maintain high rankings among all those sites would be a full time job, and a futile one at that, because the majority of your visitors weren't even looking for car sales.

The better approach is to target your visitor very carefully by selecting much more specific key phrases. In the example we are using, we could target a bit more by using phrases like, "car sales", "car selling", "used car sales", "new car sales", "car buying", etc.

However, in this example, we'd want to further target our audience due to the fact that the prospective customer base is probably local to the business. The more specific the phrases, the easier it is to get and maintain top rankings for those phrases. The number of visitors will certainly be less, but they'll be so highly qualified, and the time it takes to maintain the rankings much less. So, you might want to select, "massachusetts used car sales".

Now, when you've got a phrase you think might work, go to the various search engines and type it in, and see what comes up. Is it your competition? If not, try some variations on the phrase until you start seeing relevant results. When you get to this point, you've got a phrase that's worth optimizing for.

Targeting visitors by optimizing your site's pages for very specific key phrases is an advanced online marketing technique, and one that will surely pay off, if you put the effort in to selecting the right phrases up front.

Carl Johnson is the founder and owner of CompuGODs. He has been helping small businesses succeed on the Internet since 1999 as a freelance Web Designer, Trainer, and Internet Marketing Consultant.