One of the beginning stages of making any website is to pick the keywords you want to rank for in search engines.  These days, search engines are the best way to get targeted visitors to your site.  If you pick the keywords most suitable for your site, the visitors that you want to reach will find you.

Don’t be too general
If you are making a site about basketball, don’t choose a set of keywords like this: “basketball, nba, players, sports, ncaa, hoops”  If somebody is ever searching for just basketball scores, they will NEVER EVER search for just “basketball.”  They will be more specific and search for things like “boston celtics scores” or “friars-eagles march 18 basketball score.”  So, don’t ever be too general in picking your keywords.  It is the biggest mistake you can make because not only does nobody search for general terms, but there is also a lot of competition for those keywords.

Spelling mistakes maybe?
Sometimes if one of your keywords is commonly misspelled, you might want to choose to promote one of those common misspellings.  For example, if you are targeting “Worcester real estate” you might want to put something like “Wooster real estate.”  For your reference, here is a list of the 100 most misspelled words  and here is a typo generator.

Use tools to help you pick popular keywords
Don’t ever simply guess on the keywords to use for your site, check out which ones are actually performing well.  Go to the Google Keyword Tool to see how well your keyword does, and to get some other keyword suggestions.  For example, this blog (GettingMoreVisitors.com) deals with web promotion.  If I type in “web promotion” to the Google keyword tool, and rank the results by average search volume… it will return: web marketing, web promotion, web site promotion, website marketing, website promotion, internet web site promotion, etc. These are all some good keywords to consider.  The Overture keyword selecting tool is another good one to use.