One of the most important steps in SEO is identifying keywords that you want your site to be ranked in the top 10 for. It does not matter whether it’s a brand new site or an existing website. Brainstorm all of the terms that you think a prospective customer/visitor to your site would enter into the search engines. Take your own time. Look at the big picture - the theme of your website. A keyword can be a single word or consist of a combination of words. If it is more than a word, it is called a key-phrase.

Remember your keywords & phrases should be relevant to your site. For a site dealing with real estate some relevant keywords could be:    

Real estate

Real estate agency

Property

Buying property

Sell property

Dream house

Think about words that best describe your site and are likely to be used on your site. In a moment I will tell you how to decide which keywords to use and which ones not to.

I prefer to write all keywords for a site in a notebook. Not just keywords!!!  I use a blank notebook to take notes for every site I optimize. Write all the keywords and phrases that are relevant to your site in a notebook. This is important as you can refer to them at will, when required. You might not get all your keywords at once. No problem. You can use the following techniques to get more keywords.

1] Use tools like Wordtracker to find good keywords:  

2] Find keywords from your competitor’s site

A note of caution:

Just because a word occurs 50 times on a page and its word frequency is say 3% on that page do not think that you can achieve a higher ranking in the search engines by having that keyword 60 times on your page with a  word frequency of 3.5% or more. If you do so, you will be hurting your search engine rank. There are many reasons for a site ranking high in the search engine results. SEO isn’t that simple!!!

The biggest mistake made in web site design from search engine optimization perspective is creation of a fancy site with great graphics. Graphics is a major issue as it makes the site load very slow. It is a waste of time to spend money on search engine  optimization if the customers will not be able to download the site in the end. If your site loads too slowly, people will leave and you will lose customers. Moreover, search engines do not pick up text in graphics, no matter what image file you use JPEGS, GIFS, TIFF or BMP. Your first step in search engine optimization (SEO) is pretty simple - you have to remove all those bulky images from your web site. It is suggested that you use JPEG and GIF files for your images, if possible. Avoid use of BMP, TIFF and any other image files. They do not load as fast as JPEG files.

Inbound links are links from other web sites that point to your web site. The number and the quality of inbound links has become one of the most important ranking factors in Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. It’s a simple principle: if Site A links to Site B then it is seen by the search engines as a recommendation; that Site  A is ‘recommending’ Site B. The text that is used within the link that is linked to your website is also very important (especially to Google). Try to include your keywords or phrases into the text that is linking to your site.

Anchor text is the text (title) that appears within your hyperlink. In a well-built site the text that makes up the actual anchor link is indicative of the subject matter of the page it links to. Anchor text tells the search engines about the content of your web pages -  what the page is about and how others are perceiving it. In essence, the anchor text is about the relevancy of your webpage based on a keyword. Therefore your anchor text should always be completely relevant to the landing page (destination page) and should contain your keyword or keyword phrase.