In today’s highly competitive world, every business is trying to grab the top slot as far as online marketing is concerned. They want to get the highest page rank in all major search engines. However, obtaining higher page ranks through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a game that revolves around relevant keywords.

Keyword finalisation is one of the most critical aspects of SEO. It is aimed at finding relevant keywords that are capable of attracting quality traffic, and also have less competition. Relevant keywords refer to those keywords that best describe your business correctly. The nature of your business should be in sync with the keywords that you are including in your SEO campaign. The second criterion is the ability of the chosen keywords to attract quality traffic. This will be decided by the popularity of the keywords chosen. So, it is always advisable to go for keywords that are searched for the most. However, it is equally important to choose keywords that have less competition. This means, you should try to look for keywords that are relatively un-optimised for. This will help you bring down the bidding cost of keywords.
 
There are certain tips or steps that can be followed to make the keyword finalisation methodology simple as well as effective. The first step is to decide the theme of your website and the second step is to generate keywords that are in complete sync with the chosen theme. While doing so, it is advisable to target more general keywords for the home page and other higher level pages. For deeper pages, such as the subdirectories or sub domains, specific and qualified keywords should be generated.

Finalising seed keywords, also known as primary keywords in relevance to the theme of your site can be done in a couple of ways. First, it is the client who provides the words that he feels are relevant to the nature of his business. However, in most cases, it is the SEO firm that generates relevant seed keywords after studying the client’s website and domain thoroughly. Sometimes, you may find businesses hiring outside domain consultants for such keywords. Yet another way of generating seed keywords list is to use the meta tags of the competition websites. This is advisable only as a supplementary source, and not as a full fledged source. However, if you already have a keywords list with you, looking for the meta tags may not be given much importance. Instead, you can use tools like WT and Overture to find other relevant primary keywords. Try to get at least 10-12 seed keywords.

The seed keywords are usually single word. So, you can add qualifiers to the seed keywords to transform them into key phrases, also known as sub theme keywords. The qualifiers can be in the form of location, sub product, colour, part number, activity, and so on. The expanded seed keyword or sub theme key phrase can be of 2-3-4 word length. These phrases fulfill two purposes. First, they expand the list of your seed keywords. Usually, a list of 20-30 key phrases can be considered to be a good number. Second, they offer good rankings for your website on the major search engines. This is because, it has been found in a recent study that most of the searchers often use longer queries on the search engines. According to this study, the average length of sub theme keywords should be around 3 for the optimum results.

Besides adding qualifiers to the seed keywords, you can also play with the words generated under sub theme targeting. This will help you get even  a larger set of keywords.