Keyword selection, where it sounds like an easy task, can be a little difficult when it comes to the full optimization of your website.

When choosing keywords, you tend to gravitate towards words that describe your site, which is what you should do. However, there are instances where people do not choose keywords that are either generic enough, or precise enough, which will of course affect your search engine ranking.

You need to have specific keywords to get more traffic to your page, but you don’t want it so specific that only five people are ever going to search for it. Having a keyword that is too generic will also count against you. Sure, it will eventually bring someone to your website, but if you used “cat” like everyone else, it’s going to take you forever to get to the top of the rankings. Narrowing it to “ocelot” might be a better idea (of course if you have ocelots on your site).

There are some helpful tools out there that make life a little easier when it comes to keyword-decision-making. SEO Chat’s Keyword Difficulty Check Tool allows you to input a keyword or phrase and check to see if it would be difficult to rank. Your goal, after all, is to get your website at the top of that list that pops up when you do a Google, Yahoo, or whatever kind of search. The more difficult it is to rank, the more you need to change it. SEO Logs also has a Keyword Difficulty Check Tool for the same purpose. They both gave me similar results, when checking the difficulty of the word “cat”.

SEO Tools - Keyword Difficulty Check
Keyword Difficulty Check Tool

After re-entering a search for a more specific “ocelot”, I got a much lower difficulty rating, thus making it easier for me to score higher in the search engine ranking results.

SEO Tools - Keyword Difficulty Check

Confused? Remember: the lower the number, the easier it is to rank towards the top. The higher the number, the further down the list you’re going to be. It’s kind of opposite, but you’re rating your difficulty, higher numbers being a negative. You want it easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

So, keep in mind what words you want to describe your site with, but don’t restrict yourself to those words only. Branch out, utilize a thesaurus, use some phrases, and check them out in your keyword difficulty searches. This will be a lot more helpful to you in your SEO than placing a bunch of meaningless words.

Good luck!