“Build it and they will come.” Do you remember the movie Field of Dreams? That’s a great line for building baseball fields, but not so much for web sites. Once you’ve built your web site, how are people going to find it? I have met many a web site owner who thought that all they had to do was build a web site to become the next internet millionaire. I guess their customers were supposed to show up by magic.

Reality, of course, is more complicated than a movie plot. Your web site should be an integral part of a larger marketing plan. Not the entire thing. Just like a brick-and-mortar store, you need to get the word out through several channels, consistently, over time, to bring in customers or web site visitors. One part of that marketing plan should be to make use of the Field of Search, and capitalize on organic search results to lead visitors to your web site.

Currently, the top four search engines are Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask. Organic search results are the web sites listed in the main body of the search results page after your potential customer types in a search phrase. Ten organic results are returned per page by default, though searchers can increase that number in their search settings.

The general wisdom is that searchers are highly likely to click on several results on the first page and reasonably likely to click on promising results from pages two and three. If your web site is not showing up in those first 30 results for the search phrase used, the likelihood of a searcher finding your site decreases dramatically.

So we know it’s the goal to wind up within the first 30 organic results. But for what search phrases? This is the most vital part of SEO: Identifying search phrases, i.e. keywords, which are going to drive more visitors to your web site. This takes experience, patience, perseverance, and is the part where experts can make a big difference in your results.

Definition: when SEO experts talk about “keywords” they are actually talking about search phrases. “Keywords” are almost never a single word, but are a short phrase two to ten words long.

What you want to find are search phrases that searchers are actually using, preferably frequently, and for which there is little competition. These phrases are the gold when mining for keywords.

By “little competition”, what we mean is that there are few other web sites using that phrase. The way keywords work is complex, but one of the core facets is that your site needs to use the exact phrase somewhere in the copy, preferably several times, in order for your site to be strongly associated with the phrase by search engines. So if there are phrases out there that you are using and very few of your competitors are using, in general you have a good chance of showing up higher in the search results for that phrase.

Both factors are critical: that searchers are actually using the phrase, and that there is little competition for it. The ratio of those to factors is called KEI, Keyword Effectiveness Index. The higher the KEI, the better the chance you have of drawing visitors to your site with that phrase.

Phrases with high KEI are not obvious. They aren’t obvious at all. One of the fascinating parts of SEO is seeing what phrases searchers actually use. People use phrases, frequently, that you and I would never think of using. SEO keyword research reveals how differently people think from one another.

How do you find keywords with high KEI? Using a service like Word Tracker is absolutely essential. This and other services have indexes of what phrases searchers actually use, and indexes of how many web sites across the World Wide Web use each phrase. Starting with seed keywords – the keywords that you suspectsearchers are using, Word Tracker returns other related phrases, some of which will be even more popular than the ones you thought of. Then experience comes into play. An SEO professional will work with variations of potential keywords based on what they’ve seen before, and research they do on your competitors and your industry in general. They blend that with tenacity and heaps of patience to mine those phrases with high KEI.

Common mistakes made:

1. Focusing on being number one rather than driving more visitors to your site. What would you rather have: a number one search position for an obscure phrase no one searches on, or a lower position for a search phrase that brings in more visitors?
2. Using single-word “keywords”
3. Using your keywords only in the keywords meta tag and not anywhere in the content of your web pages
4. Using only keywords that are highly popular (and which likely have tons of competition). It is okay and even desirable to use a few highly popular search phrases, but high-KEI keyword phrases should be in the majority.
5. Using keyword phrases that you think up off the top of your head

Once you’ve identified a number of search phrases for which you want to optimize your site the rest is fairly straightforward. You can find information about that in many of the good SEO books on the market.

Your web site optimization is only as good as the keyword phrases you choose. In this case quality begets quantity: good keyword phrases can lead more visitors to your web site.