Can somebody help me with keywords for a few websites?

Internet marketing seems so incredibly confusing. I'm looking for a little assistance. I have 3 websites i want to market www.3riverscreative.com, www.jasongreiner.com and www.twistedangels.net and I'm working with a company but they want keywords from me.





I figured this would be easy but it seems to be anything but. Should I only use a few or put dozens out there? Should they be similar or different?





And, tools like the google keyword tool don't really help at all because the results don't really seem to provide me with any useful info.





All I'm looking for are some things that will be searched often but don't have a ton of competition and will actually be related to my sites, imagine that.





Any help would be appreciated.|||You wrote: "All I'm looking for are some things that will be searched often but don't have a ton of competition and will actually be related to my sites..."





I'm not sure you have clear the main purpose of choosing keywords.





There is no point of being #1 in google with keywords that are kind'a, sort'a your business.





You need to think as a user (customer) and clearly identify what are the keywords that better represent your product/service and work on them in your pages... that's why they are asking you for kewords; to align the SEO effort with your keywords.





I have a little article on SEO I hope this help you understand why the SEO company is asking you for keywords.


http://innovoideas.blogspot.com/2010/07/鈥?/a>





To put an example: If I need a carpet cleaned at home, I'll go to google and probably search: Carpet cleaner + mylocation (this is a local service).





A "related, very popular search keyword" may be STEAM... but is probably very used for other search purposes... so if the carpet cleaning company appears when someone uses "steam" looking for other things, I won't get that customer even if I'm at the top of the search results.





The bottom line: Think as a user (your target audience) and think what would they search for a service like yours.





I hope this helps, but fell free to contact me if you are not clear.|||- Remember that, target at least those keywords which have good searches and competition.





- You can target same keywords for all if they are providing the same services.





- Target a few bunch of keywords for all rather than taking 50-100 keywords. Only dozens or less prominent keywords you can use for your site.





- Keep patience, don't change your strategy so fast as SEO needs time for good results. At least give 2-3 months for each strategy, you are using





All the best|||Hi, I can help you out for finding best keywords for your websites.|||I will deal with the www.3riverscreative.com web site for this answer. It looks like you have photography, writing and graphic arts services you would like to promote.





You are located in Pittsburgh, so you may also want to include your city regularly so locals can find you.





The most important thing to remember is that a single page of a web site will usually only rank well for ONE key word phrase.





So you will need a DIFFERENT page on your web site for each key word you would like to be found for,





So I would set up keyword phrases like:





Pittsburgh photography


Pittsburgh wedding photography


Pittsburgh wedding pictures


Pittsburgh children photography


Pittsburgh children photos


Pittsburgh portraits





On each page you set up, you should use the word regularly and include it in the title of each page.





Make sure you have text links in your navigation that link to your page, perhaps with a site map.





Here are a list of search engine optimization tools I put together for you:


http://ebusinesstutor.com/blog/recommend鈥?/a>





Hope this helps,





Garland Coulson, "The EBusiness Tutor"|||Indeed, keyword research, selection, and use can be a little hairy in the beginning. I'll answer your question with what usually helps me figure it all out for my websites.





You address the amount of keywords you should use... I'll start with that.





First, it's recommended that you build what many experts call your "Master Keyword List (MKL)". Start that list begin with 5 - 7 seed keywords. These should be broad, general, highly relevant keywords that enjoy high search volume. Forget about competition for the time being.





You should have one MKL per website, and it should include as many keywords as possible that are relevant to your website's main thematic center. The more keywords you can come up with the better.





That answers the first part of your question: the more keywords you include in your MKL the better, hundreds of keywords aren't unheard of. The more the better... literally!





Now, it's important that you get creative in generating keyword ideas so you can come up with as many keywords as possible. Although you mentioned the Google Keyword Tool as not being too helpful for you, I think that in time you'll come to realize that It really is a great tool, not only because of the search statistics it provides, but also because of the relevant suggestions it also provides. You can also use Google Suggest, and Google Sets.





Once you're comfortable with your MKL, group your chosen keywords in "clusters"...





The few seed keywords would make up the "start page cluster", and you should assign the one or two that BEST describe your site's theme to your start page (home) and use those for optimization.





Then pick out keywords that imply "category" and you've got your "category cluster"... assign them to the category pages in your site.





The rest of the keywords in your MKL are should be assigned to your content pages of your site.





So you see that you really can't think of keyword research, selection, and use separate from your site's architecture... they go hand in hand.





Now, there are some people who go for really high search volume keywords because they're the ones that can bring the highest amount of traffic... don't be afraid of those competitive keywords. I follow that school of thought.





Sure, do include in your MKL all the keywords that are relevant, even if they don't attract too much traffic,because they'll provide potential content themes that you can use to add pages to your site, thus creating page rank for your site as a whole... and, certainly your other pages that are optimized for your highly competed keywords.





That means that you should certainly choose high volume high competition keywords and then try to edge out the competition by optimizing better, getting higher quality links, and constantly growing your site by adding more and more pages which build page rank.





I hope this helps... and just write if you need any further explanation.