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While many factors influence the rankings of a web site, any search engine optimization effort isnt worth even a second of your time without one and single unknown: relevant and competitive keywords.

Lets examine an example: a local moving company decided to optimize its website. It knows (or assumes that it does) that the most popular keywords for their type of business are movers and moving. At a first glance, looks like everythings fine: the keywords seem to be relevant, and should produce good results. However, there are two mistakes made here. The first one is keyword relevancy. Whats the use for our local moving company of people that are looking for movers or moving in Denver, CO, Boston, MA or New York, NY, if they are located and offering services in and around San Francisco only?

Another mistake is keyword effectiveness. Itll take much more time and effort to get top rankings for such popular and competitive general keywords as moving and movers than to get same results for something more specific and relevant, such as movers San Francisco or moving San Francisco. Not only are these keywords more likely to convert visitors to buyers, but also its a much easier and less time-consuming task. If the world we live in consists of atoms, the smallest and most important particles in search engine optimization world are keywords. In fact, theres nothing complicated about them, if one remembers three things about keywords: relevancy, effectiveness and Wordtracker.

Wordtracker.com is an UK based company that offers an irreplaceable search engine marketing service tool: keyword research and analysis. It helps to find and pick keywords that are both relevant and competitive. Relevant mean that the keywords are related to your website, and that these are the words people are typing in Google, Yahoo or MSN in order to find your kind of business. Another important factor in determining a good keyword is its effectiveness. Lets say we have a keyword movers which has a record of appearing in Google search list for 1009 times; there are 15400000 different web pages competing for this keyword. This means that this keywords effectiveness index is 1009/15400000=0.066. This index shows that the keyword is far too competitive and youll probably end up somewhere in the middle of Googles search results if you try to optimize your webpage for this particular keyword.

A rule of thumb is to find keywords that are quite popular and at the same time have fewer webpages competing for them. A good keyword is considered to have an effectiveness index of over 100, although anything in between 10 and 100 can be targeted as well.

Needless to say, without having the right keywords that are both relevant and competitive its impossible to succeed in any search engine optimization campaign. Without knowing your niche words, youll probably end up competing against web sites with thousands of inbound links optimized by search engine optimization gurus and will be lost in millions of search results no one will even ever find out you exist. On the other hand, all it takes to get your web traffic from 0 to couple hundreds a day might be something as simple and cost-effective as Wordtracker.

Marty Pukstys is a co-owner of Search Engine Marketing Service LLC and specializes in search engine optimization services such as meta tags optimization services