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!!!