What are they looking for?
When you want to find something on the web, chances are good that you start by typing in a keyword or phrase into a search engine. When someone goes looking for products, services, or content like your site's, you want them to see your site at the top of the search results. The way to achieve this is by strategically positioning your site to maximize your search engine ranking on the most important keywords and phrases. But how to decide which keywords matter most to your site?

Tried and True Methods
There are several ways to find your strategic keywords, but there are a few obvious sources. First of all, think of what words you would use to search for your site's content. The next obvious place to look is in the "keywords" META tags and page titles of other web sites. Finally, look at newsgroups, mailing lists, and discussion groups on similar subjects to make sure you haven't missed any keywords. Simply browsing the subject lines of a few days worth of newsgroup postings will probably give you all the keywords you need.

Now, there's a Better Way...
So, you've got a list of keywords written down. Now it's time to find out which ones really matter to web surfers. We'll accomplish this by taking advantage of a "pay per click" search engine and a "pay for placement" site. For each keyword or phrase on your list, try it out on both of the following to see how popular that search is. For reference, try typing in "Pokemon" in both - that's the #1 most popular search keyword on the web right now. That will give you an idea of how much more or less popular your keywords are in the big scheme of things.

• GoTo.com's Keyword Suggestions Page
  The major advantage of this one is that it gives you an exact count of how many times visitors searched for a given keyword or phrase. In addition, it suggests alternative keywords and gives you the counts for those. However, it's skewed in more than one way - first of all, it's a pay-per-click engine, so many of the searches are done by people just like you, who are trying to promote their site. Why does this skew things? Because Website operators will try many variations of a keyword or phrase, just to see which terms they can afford to bid on - "normal" web surfers probably do one search and click their way off to a web site.
  
  
• MSN BCentral's Keyword Evaluator
  MSN has seen the potential in selling keywords, and they go about it in a fairly unique way - the keywords are auctioned off every Tuesday at 8pm Eastern Time (USA), and only the highest bidder gets preferred placement. The two advantages of GoTo.com's keyword finder are missing here - you get a broad range on the number of searches performed for your keywords, and you don't get any suggestions for alternatives. However, if you've done your homework and refined it with GoTo's tool, you can use BCentral's Keyword Evaluator to get valid results from a real search engine. If MSN is getting less than 1,000 searches a month for a keyword or phrase, you may want to find a better one.

After finding out how popular each keyword or phrase on your list really is, you can focus your search engine positioning efforts in the right place. Nearly every web site operator in your field of interest is trying to maximize their ranking on the most popular keywords. You may not be able to reach anywhere near the top of the list for your most prized keywords. Now that you know how popular each one is, though, you can work your way down the list until you start to hit pay dirt