Last week, I wrote about the first and most important step to take if you want to boost your website traffic. But what to do next?

The second step of your SEO (and PPC campaigns as well) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for your product type in Google or Yahoo. For example, if you are a marketing consultancy, one of your keywords may be “marketing advice”.Creating a rich and appropriately targetted keyword list is a fundamental step that will have a strong impact on your campaign success. Avoid expensive general keywords: you will certainly get a high rate of impressions, but not necessarily high conversion sales. Focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “marketing” as there are many people typing this word in, but they are not looking for any marketing help or advice for their business. Instead, go for combinations such as “marketing help”, “marketing consultancy” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right words:

1) Organise a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends or relatives to find keywords relevant to your business. Focus on the needs of your target audience, what they would type in when looking for your products. Having created your customer value proposition before, this should be now much easier to do.

2) Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. Providing that you barely reach this goal, do use search term suggestion tool. These will give you an idea what phrases based on your keyword have been looked for recently.

3) Don’t forget dashes, apostrophes, spelling variations, plural versions and various tenses. Your potential customers will not search a keyword in the same way. For instance: website, web site, web-site.

4) Check out your competitors’ webpages for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags. They could be a good tip for yours!When you are combining your SEO with PPC advertising campaigns, it is very helpful to use tracking results from Google Ads or Yahoo! Search Marketing to revalue your keyword list. Try to put emphasis on those which gain the highest number of clicks in your PPC campaigns.