The spread of search-engine-optimised copy on the web has led to many acts of atrocity against the written word. If the owner of a website is told, “these are your keywords and they need to appear x number of times on this page”, chances are the copy will suffer.
A website’s keywords (or keyphrases) are put together through a variety of steps and each expert’s technique will be slightly different. One can either start big, with a huge long list of every possible permutation of brand, product or service, and then work down; or start small with a refined list of proven keywords and work outwards, hoping not to miss any gaps. There are lots of tools that will help with this research along the way.
Ultimately, a keyword will make it onto the list if it has a certain level of search volume, isn’t too competitive for the website (eg. ‘iphone’ would be too competitive a keyword for most small business websites) and represents what is on the page it is to appear on. The days of keyword stuffing and keyword density are just about over, but that doesn’t mean writers know what to do with this list.
It’s a balance: you need to include the keywords to get visitors via the search engines, but you also need to keep those visitors once they arrive. The easiest way to do this is to be sensible about the number of keywords you’re aiming for and to write copy with those words in mind from the very beginning. Ideally, such an informed awareness of the way your customer is searching for what you offer will actually lead to better sales copy than you would have had without the research.