Most business owners that decide to improve their offline business by going online are the most likely to ask their web designers just for some beautiful website. However, a website should be more than just a beautiful wrapping of an offline business, but an appealing and yet client focused platform.

Search engine optimization is a general term that everybody knows. Most people however think of SEO as if it was just some extreme link building process, with no prior preparation. The truth is SEO is worthless without a proper keyword analysis and selection.

Everybody thinks about building a site, stuffing it with lots of useful content, hoping to drive traffic and make sales. In order to achieve online success you don't have to forget to pay attention to the foundation of all that. Keyword analysis and selection represents the foundation of each online project.

Knowing from the beginning which are the keywords you want to optimize your site for will make all your SEO endeavors much easier. Not only it will be easier to implement SEO, but also your marketing strategy will be more concise. Thinking about keywords before setting up your website is a plus, as you will not have to go back and tune things in order to make them work better.

The keywords you will optimize your site for must respect a few characteristics:

1.) Keywords must be representative for your business, services and products. It's absolutely normal for your keywords to represent your business. You can not optimize your site for "plumbers new york" if your company is in Chicago. There are lots of sites that are being optimized for certain keywords that have nothing to do with their services.

2.) Keywords must meet your visitor. Make sure you understand what your keyword means and what your visitors’ expectations are. You have to put yourself into your visitor's place and figure out what are his expectations when typing your keywords into a search engine's search box.

3.) Keywords must have a reasonable number of queries on search engines. It is said that long term queries are more likely to convert a visitor into a client. That's true, but you have to be really careful when choosing 6-7 words long keyword phrases, as those keywords might not be very popular among search engine users.

You might find yourself in the situation of choosing the perfect keyword for you and then see that keyword is very competitive. There are 2 solutions in this case. One of them is going geographical and adding your city, county or region to main keywords. The second solution is finding some other niches that aren't very well developed and where you can have better chances of succeeding.

Once you have found the right keywords for you, take a look at your site's content. Try including keywords in content, but don't do it aggressively. Common sense is a rule in SEO too. Don't use weird phrases or sentences just for the sake of SEO. The site is for human visitors after all.

The first place where you should put your keyword is in your meta tags. It's not that important as it used to be, but it's still a must do.

Respecting this few, yet important keyword selection steps, will definitely help you implement your overall SEO process.