You may have optimized your store and people are visiting — but not many.  Why? It could very well be the keywords you are choosing to optimize for.

Choosing the right keywords take time, deep thought and effort. When choosing keywords to expand your search engine visibility you should be asking yourself some of these questions.

1.) What are the exact words people are using to find the products? Examples:  discount tools, cheap tools, free tools, red, ugly tools — you get my meaning.

2.) Are my keywords too general, or overused? If the keywords are too general (broad), you may receive visitors that are not buyers, just folks window shopping. If your keywords are overused, you may be so far down in the search engine results that your store will never be seen.

3.) Do you have your keywords or keyword phrase in your Title Tag? Your keywords in the Title element of your pages  should be relevant and specific for what your web page’s text relates too. If your title tags are irrelevant, you’ve just wasted an important opportunity to tell the search engines what the page is about for them to rank.

4. Meta Keywords Tag? Some webmasters use the Meta keywords Tag and others say that the search engines no longer use them…  And still others, claim that it gives their competition an unfair advantage. I personally will continue to use them, because clearly there is not harm in doing so…. IF you are using the tag correctly.

Finding the correct keywords or search phrases for your store is no easy task.  However, did you think of asking the people, friends and family what keywords or phases they would search to find your products?  You might be very surprised — it may not have been a keyword or phase that you even considered. Many times we know our own products deeply and do not think like the average searcher.

Keyword Popularity
Even though a keyword may be popular, you also must consider if it is targeting your specific market and product line.  Why should you consider this?  Non specific or un-targeted traffic will chew up lots of bandwidth, but more often than not fail to provide sales. The bottom line is not so much the popularity of the word, as the quality of the web traffic that the keyword brings. A keyword providing only 25 visits a day but converting at 7% is far more valuable that 200 visits a day with little or no conversions.

Very popular keywords will find your shop competing with historically established websites — which translates into poor organic positioning for some time.  Consider other smaller niche market keywords for your “bread and butter” traffic, but don’t fail to optimize for the larger keywords for future traffic.

Experiment
Experiment with the keywords that you use for your store, to determine if the keywords you are using are giving you the sales you want. A keyword, no matter how well you rank, which does not provide targeted and converting traffic is useless.

I have found testing, evaluating and re-evaluating is the name of the game for successful SEO. If you keep that in mind, and muster some patience you will begin to see the results you want.

However, once you are in the top ten of the search results, do not think your SEO is done. You must continue to monitor and improve — because the world wide web is not a static environment — and new stores, algorithm changes, the economy and more can quickly and without notice change your positions and traffic.