Search engine optimization is often a second thought for most small or medium sized organizations.  Without the budget to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring a good search engine optimization consultant in to go after the highest trafficked search terms, most organizations just throw content on their site and hope that they will receive traffic from search engines.  The following series will give you a step by step guide on how to create a search engine optimization strategy for your organization.  The result of this series should be an increase in traffic from search engines for relevant search terms.  If all goes well, your organization should make it on to the first page of results for relevant search terms.

The first part in this series, and possibly the most important part of this process, is keyword selection.  Until your organization has the money to hire a consulting firm, I would suggest selecting a single group of keywords (2 to 4 word grouping) to focus your efforts on.  Trying to account for too many keyword groups could backfire for your organization.

We will be using a fictitious organization to help show how you could help your organization improve its overall ranking.  The organization we will be creating a search engine optimization strategy for will be called "Corporations for a Cooler Planet".  The idea behind our organization is that corporations need to take charge and fight the global warming battle through reducing their own operating carbon footprint as well as the carbon footprint of the product or service they sell.

Step 1: Most Generic Term Possible
There is actually not to much to the first step in creating your search engine optimization strategy.  You are going to want to choose what you think the most general term possible that describes your organization, or what your organization is focused on.  For Corporations for a Cooler Planet, we are interested in the general term "global warming" because it is possibly the most generic term that we could use to describe why our organization is in existence.  If your trade association handles arthritis medicine manufacturers, then you would more than like want to just choose "arthritis" as your most generic term possible.

Step 2: Other Variations of Most Generic Term
Now that you have an idea of the most generic term to describe your organization, you can start using online tools to determine other common searches that relate to your generic term as well as how many times it is estimated that those terms are used.  The best tool to do this is the WordTracker.com Free Keyword Suggestion Tool.  If your organization has the means to create an account for WordTracker.com and pay, go ahead.  Otherwise, the free version is enough to help you figure out what keywords to tackle.  Visit WordTracker and enter in the keywords you came up with in step 1.

Once you have entered your keywords, click on the "Hit Me" button.  This will take you to the results page that will display a table with the following information:

The information that you are seeing is a snapshot of how often keyword combinations are used throughout common search engines. Obviously you would want for your organization to focus on getting to the top rankings for the term "global warming", correct?  Not necessarily... unfortunately as we can see by click on the graph symbol to the right of the keywords pair "global warming", we are presented with an incredibly useful screen shown below.

In the SEO world, there are just some keyword pairs that are not even worth spending your time on if you don't have the budget unless it is really the only useful combination of keywords your organization can come up with.  In the above screen, you can see that WordTracker gives us two variables.  In the absolute best case scenario, you will be able to find a keyword combination where both the "Google Competition" and the "Actual visitors from #1 in Google/Day" metrics are green.  The first metric (Google competition) is the number of results returned by google for that specific search term.  In order to be ranked number one for the term "global warming", your organization needs to beat out the rest of the 52,500,000 websites that are already ranked higher than your organization for those keywords.  Pretty impressive feat if you accomplish this.  The other metric is the number of individuals you will receive per day if you are ranked number one in google for those seach keywords.

Our keyword selection "global warming facts".