Selecting keywords is the surefire step to build an online business on the right track. If you happen to make mistakes in selecting the proper keywords for your site/blog, you may end up getting few targeted visitors, lose your trustworthiness as an expert or even get no potential clients.

There are several different methods that are not suitable to lead you to the results you’re planning for, but 3 of them are the major mistakes that many are tempted to make. People are intrigued to choose keywords by these methods, because they’ve seen some very successful online businesses are using them. You should be cautious as there are many successful strategies out there, but they cannot bring about the same organic SEO results for everybody.

I list the mistakes here so that you can check out your policies in keyword selection process and see if you take such steps:

Do You Select Well-Known Keywords for Site?

I’m sure you all know how powerful some sites are that rank highly at search engines for well-known keywords in their industries. Some examples of these keywords that I want you to avoid are:

• travel
• real estate
• music
• movies
• football
• sportware
• etc

Those big boys who rank on top of the Google result pages for such keywords are not easy to surpass. As small businesses or newcomers to the virtual world of Internet, you’d better forget about ranking for such keywords. However, they’re not always the best ones as they’re very general and don’t specify any particular need or purchase.

Imagine you manage to rank highly for “music”. Does this bring all the potential buyers of the type of music you sell? There could be your type of customers among them, but even those people may be distracted by the content you provide at a certain landing page. The best policy will be to bring the targeted traffic to the specific content they are looking for.

Do You Select Well-Known Names as Your Keywords?

Some site owners make this mistake to attract the traffic of the well-known businesses and sell them what they’re searching for. The worst consequence of this policy is to disappoint your visitors by not being who you’ve claimed to be.

Some people take this policy as they think customers are looking for the specific products, not specific site owners, but they don’t consider one major fact: Some prefer to buy specific products from the REAL owners of that business. Once it’s revealed you’re not the same people you’ve introduced yourself as, you’ve made a terrible reputation for yourself.

Therefore, I would recommend you to avoid this trick and believe that you don’t need to provide names. The quality of the content and how you present it to the target audience is the policy that could help you out a lot more.

Do You Target Top Sought-After Keywords without Proportionate SEO Work?

It’s great to learn from the major players of particular niches on the internet, but you should consider what they’ve done to reach and what they’re doing now to stay in that position to rank for those keywords. It takes lots of time, energy, financial resources and so on to be the number one in a niche.

If you want to rank highly for those highly sought-after keywords, there’s no problem as far as:

• You create huge amount of content at your site regularly,
• You create lots of content (articles, press releases, videos, slides, photos, etc) and distribute them regularly,
• You participate actively on social media and react quickly to whatever feedback you get over there, and
• You have the resources to do all the above on a consistent and regular basis for the months and years to come.

Many lack such capabilities and still insist on being the number one in those niches without putting proportionate efforts in what they want to acquire. Naturally, this won’t happen and they become frustrated.

More Reasonable Keyword Selection Policy

Well, if you ask me what the best policy will be to gain top ranking in search engines and higher visibility on the web, I would say:

1. Be yourself and don’t expect more than what you’re capable of,
2. Target the long tail keywords at your niche,
3. You don’t have to be known by name first,
4. Continue SEO job on a regular basis and consistent way,
5. Never stop doing the right thing in achieving the right goal.

With perseverance and persistent search engine optimization job applied to the content building effort, you will manage to get to the reasonable targets you’ve set for your online business. Please share you experiences and tell us how you think  we must reasonably go ahead with keyword selection.