When starting out on your quest to find the “best” keywords for your overall site side strategy – one could go about doing this in a number of ways

1) No real planning – just find any word that you might find in your site

2) Develop a real competitive strategy and find the most relevant keywords your competition is showing for – check to see if your site is anywhere in the top 2 pages.

I’d personally go with the 2nd strategy listed, but that’s just me. I have worked with a number of SEOs from the most experienced to those just starting out, all have varying ways of trying to accomplish this sometimes heavy task.

First understand who your competition is. That alone will get your keyword research going. Knowing they have the same audience as you do, understand what keywords they are found for on the first page in Google and Yahoo. Are these keywords being targeted on any of your pages at all? If not, you had better revisit your high priority content and get that updated to reflect this.

Develop a list of those competitive keywords – they should always be as specific in nature as possible to your products and services. Always take into consideration the size of your site as compared to your competition, can you displace any of those results? That should be your overall goal – also of course keeping in mind your conversion rate too.

As you know link building is very important to the overall health and well-being of your SEO campaign, so get the keywords right – this will set the stage for bigger SEO factors later.

This now leads me to really start talking a great deal more about link building, and other off page factors.