You have quite a few options when deciding on what keywords to optimize. FIRST of all you have to decide which keywords before starting any seo.

Keyword research goes first, the other things follow.

If this is your first website, you are starting seo for the first time the following means - success or failure. Either way you still learn something from the experience.

Failure - if you are selling dog food, and want customers who buy dog food do not optimize your website for the best keyword in your niche - without checking the competition number.

Success - starting out for the first time? Then find a keyword with 50-100 visitors a day and 1-3million competing websites only!

That way, it’s not mission impossible.

You can outrank websites who have 24 million competitors - once you gain that experience, just like anything else in life, you need some experience before you can do it perfectly right!

Free keyword tools exist, but there are also the paid ones.

The paid ones provide more detailed results. With a free tool it is enough if you are just starting out - to find that low competing keyword.

But if you have the budget you can go directly with a paid tool - and find those gems of keywords, these are keywords with high search volume and low competition number - something that is amazing.

That means the keywords will be easy to get the number 1 rank while at the same time it provides a ton of traffic.

But with a free tool probably you won’t ever find such gems.

So you have two options, like test driving some paid tool to see if you find the keyword gems - for “easy” rankings. Or use a free tool to find a keyword with 50-100 daily searches and less than 3million competition.

What next?

You have the keyword in your hand, only one.

Next optimize your website around that main keyword.

Here are some common mistakes I’ve seen a lot.

Mistake number 1: So my website is in the business niche, so the keyword I will optimize my website for is business. What’s wrong there?

Mistake number 2: They put the keyword like ten times in the meta keyword tag, and flood their meta title and description with their keyword.

Mistake number one show the webmaster did not really do his homework properly. Knowledge IS first, you need to understand seo, before you spend your time and money.