They say that a perfect plan makes the job half done. The same is even truer when it comes to a SEO campaign. This is the phase where I squeeze my brain the most. And so far I have found it working for me. The main hurdle of a SEO project is that ninety out of hundred times I have to deal with clients who are really really confused about their goals. And I think that is the meadow where the main challenge for a good search engine optimizer lies. So before I jumpstart with the campaign I first ask my clients to describe their business in some words. And pretty often I receive a cluster of fuzzy dialects that needs multiple refinements. So the very first task that I assign myself with is filtering down the all important list of target keywords from the cloud of thousands of related keywords.

This part is really sensitive from the perspective of a campaign’s success. Any mistake made at this phase means months of useless effort. And not just that, any campaign run under the header of wrong keywords also risks the reputation of the corresponding brand.

For an example, someone who comes to your site hitting the key phrase, “pizza recipe”, expects to find some mouth watering recipes of pizza in your site that she will prepare for her friends in the weekend party. But if your site deals with home delivery of pizza and other stuffs from different restaurants, then there is every possibility that she might get irritated. And tag your site with a traitor’s reputation. And no one definitely wants to take such negative pills.

So though it some time looks lucrative to pull traffic from broad keywords, its often not targeted and thus doesn’t bring conversions. So while making the selection here are some points that and methods that I religiously follow;

• An initial brainstorming session to collect all the possible keywords and key phrases that one might type in to visit your site, I always do it from a customer’s perspective.
• Next comes the competitor analysis section, where I analyze all the keywords that our potential competitors are already using.
• Then I take the help of Google analytics and Google webmaster tools (if installed already otherwise from the site’s log) to get an idea of the keywords that are already pulling traffic. Then I trail their paths in our site, and find out how many of them are actually reaching our all important conversion page or filling up the conversion form. From this I get a strong idea of keywords that are already bringing me conversions.

Based upon the list made from these three beehives, I create my recipe which always is a balanced mix of broad, semi broad and long tail keywords/key phrases.

Broad keywords once raise their heads can bring a good amount of traffic, some of them might bring conversion. So we can not overlook them completely.

Semi broad key words/key phrases often play an important role to bring target specific groups.

The long tail key phrases bring the least number of traffic, but their conversion rates are often observed to be highest. The more information an user types in his search bar, the better is the chance that he is positive about buying the related service. Moreover, its far more easier to rank in long tail key phrase than the broader ones. So if chosen carefully and intelligently, long tail keywords can really do wonders.