There are many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants that will charge you an arm and a leg for their services, sometimes as much as $2,000 per month or more. They often make dubious claims that they can get you ranked on the first page of the search engines within a few months, and if not, they will kindly refund your money.

However, there is a catch. Once you pay the initial deposit and the SEO company begins working on your site, they will often optimize your website in such a manner so that you will be able to quickly rise to the top of the rankings for a keyword that is either not significant or will not attract any real traffic.

If you want to improve your ranking and attract qualified traffic to your website, you need to use a different approach:

1. Optimize your website for the keywords or phrases that people actually use when searching for products or services related to what you offer.
2. Modify higher volume keywords and search terms with phrases that are more specific to your services and industry.
3. Localize your keywords to your target market and client’s location.
4. Try to have a decent amount of free content on your website that relates to the keywords or phrases for which you want to be ranked higher.

There are a multitude of factors that should be considered when you optimize your web site. When developing great web copy that will provide valuable visitor information and great natural search engine results, begin by building a keyword list. Here are a few ideas to help get your keyword research started.

Here are the steps I use to optimize a website:

1. Identify website themes.
Look for brand names of the products or services that are unique to that particular website. Remember, the website name itself is a brand name too. Then determine the main themes of the website.

2. Create a keyword list
Write down all the keywords related to the brand and themes of the website site. Try to also include keyword phrases in your keyword research. There may be millions of web sites that are similar; therefore you need to sharpen your focus. Search for the niche keywords and keyword phrases that support your brand and main themes. If your niche is too competitive you will have a harder time getting high search engine rankings. Ideally you want your site to appear on the first page for one of the major search engines…Google, MSN, ASK or Yahoo.

3. Use a keyword selector tool.
Pick related keywords, these are words that are something like the main keyword list you created above. You may be able to blend them into the content of your site as it grows. Keywords that have a very narrow focus may not be a popular search term. When I broaden my search to comprise themes and categories, I repeatedly find hundreds of words that relate to the topics that work with my keyword list. To find out how often people are searching on the identified keywords you need to use a keyword selector tool.

I use a combination of both free and paid tools. The real work is understanding the keyword selector tool and the results that they generate. It’s not always the highest search results that will give you the best keywords.