SEO Keyword Selection Basic Example

How do you choose your keywords?

If I had a website that sold shoes, I might have an individual page for dress shoes and another page for running shoes. To set this in perspective “shoes” would be considered a category and “dress shoes” and “running shoes” would be considered  subcategories of  “shoes”.  Within the “dress shoe” subcategory there are many choices such as a “mens black leather dress shoe”. This is a specific detail page for a specific product.

If one were to search for the term “shoes” the search engines could return results anything from “dress shoes” to “horse shoes”. The search term would have to have more specific information to return a quality result ie. “men’s black leather dress shoe”.

As to the example above, in order to provide the search engines the information it needs to rank your relevant page for “mens black leather dress shoe”, one would need to optimize the page for those terms. But keywords are not the only signal. The most important element is to provide the reader with quality content that is relevant to the reader.