Newcomers to SEO – and even those who aren't new to the field – often ask a ton of questions about keywords. How many should a website target? How many per page? Where should they be placed? The best answers involve growing your website organically, rather like a garden.
So let's start with the idea that you're building a website on gardening. Maybe you want to sell your landscaping services, or maybe you're helping a local botanical garden build more interest by building up their website. Or you might simply be a hobbyist gardener who wants to share your experiences with other hobbyists. However you look at it, you need to start somewhere.
So choose your main keywords, starting with your home page. Very likely you'll start with something like “gardening in [your location]” or “landscaping services [location].” But that's only the beginning. Gardening is a big field, so to speak, so to capture interest and build traffic, you may decide to maintain a blog on your website. You can find a lot of options to help make blogging easy, and some of the best software for blogging is open source (and may not cost you a cent).
If you're going to start a gardening blog, you'll want to aim for three blog entries a week. That's enough new content to attract both the search engines and human readers. Try to be consistent; search spiders and humans are both creatures of habit. If you post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, try not to stray from that unless something really serious happens. Many blogging software suites and content management systems let you create content and schedule it to “go live” on your website well in advance. That would allow you to set aside a block of time to write up several posts.
So what does this have to do with keywords? Patience, I'm getting to that. In your blog posts, you may naturally include the keywords for your home page. After all, if you run a landscaping business in a particular area, and you're writing a blog that appears on your company's website, it would look a little funny NOT to mention your business every so often! But those aren't the keywords you're aiming for on your blog's pages. Instead, you're aiming for related keywords that bring in related traffic.
Let me give you an example. Say you run a landscape business in central Florida. You're getting questions from your customers about what plants they can grow that will not attract pests. You can do a post titled something like “Growing Pest-Free Plants in Central Florida.” In that post you can talk about which plants attract the fewest pests, what growing conditions they require, how to plant them, how big they get, who should consider growing them, and so forth. With that kind of post, you're adding a whole host of keywords to your website – not just “growing pest-free plants,” but specific plant names as well.
Choosing Keywords 
