The absolute foundation of any efforts you make to be found on the search engines must be your Key Word Combinations. I like to use the term “combinations” because it emphasizes the fact that the terms people use to search for you are almost always combinations of key words. These combinations might include numerous variations of similar themes about your business and how people think about it.

What are good key word combinations for you? Here is the best definition I have ever used, even though it might sound a little awkward: “When someone searches for X, I want him or her to find my site. What is X?”

Start making your list. Keep in mind that people might have many different ideas about your business and how they might search for it. For example, if you provide a service that essentially solves a problem for your clients, you might consider that they might search by the problem. For example: “treat lower back pain” for a massage therapist.

If you have a limited geographic area you can serve, don’t forget to include that in your key word combinations. I have a client who owns her own air charter service in the Pacific Northwest. She wants to come up on searches that include terms like “air taxi” and “air charter.” However, it doesn’t really help her to do well on the search engines for “air taxi new york” since she can’t help someone that far away. In fact, it might be a waste of her time to even respond to that potential customer. So, we worked hard to come up with key word combinations that included locations in the Pacific Northwest, like Seattle and Portland.

Your list will grow. One of the things you will begin to wonder as you brainstorm all these key word combinations is whether or not they are ultimately valuable? There are three factors to determine the value of key word combinations.

The first is relevance. Relevance simply means that the key word combination is relevant to what you do. Don’t forget that words often have multiple meanings. I was approached to do some optimization work for Jeld-Wen. Jeld-Wen is a company in Klamath Falls, Oregon that manufactures windows and doors for homes and buildings all over the world. Since they could sell their products anywhere in the world, they had no location terms in their key word combinations, which left us with the one word term: “windows.” See the problem? No matter how big they got, they had no hope of knocking the number one computer operating system (from Microsoft) out of the top search engine spots.

The second is competition. If you have ever looked closely at search engine results, you will see a notation that says something like “Results 1-10 out of 214,000 for…” The big number indicates how many pages that search engine has in its index for that search term. The bigger the number, the more competition, the more difficult it will be for you to get results quickly.

The third is popularity. Popularity simply means “how often are the key word combinations searched?” The search engines are understandably hesitant to share this sort of information. However, Google now gives us at least a glimpse of popularity numbers with its key word suggestion tool. Test your key word combinations with an eye toward using ones that are more popular. But keep in mind that terms low in popularity but high in relevance may still be valuable. For example, if a term is only searched once a month, but it is so highly relevant to your business that it will likely result in a conversion - a sale - it is almost certainly worth using that term.

Think of it this way: your sales leads qualify themselves by how they search. A search for “three bedroom ranch house in the 97223 zip code” is a more qualified lead than “portland oregon real estate.” The former may not be searched as often, but it could be crucially valuable to you when it is searched.

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