Starting in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be daunting. I’m going to be approaching it one step at a time and I’ve decided to start with keywords. As I’ve mentioned before, Google’s Webmaster Tools are still showing keywords that look like the belong to my domain name before I took it on. They all relate to Canada and travel and they are definitely not words that even appear on my site even once. So, keyword optimization - what’s it all about?

The first step is to determine your keywords and keyword phrases and then sort by popularity. With a very young blog, like this one, you may not have the logs and reports to analyse keywords from hits. I’ve downloaded a copy of Good Keywords to help me understand what my site is saying to search engines. This will give me a good start in really looking at the way I use (if I do) keywords currently. A snapshot today shows:

Looking at the Keyword Table in Good Keywords I can see that there is plenty of work to do. My next task is now look at refining and combining keyword phrases for maximum impact.

In the meantime I have also read about a couple of Wordpress plugins that are available. I’ll report on my progress with SEO plugins in another post once I’ve had a further look.