A reader of mine asked if I can make some sort of case study. Come to think of it, I think it is a great idea and it will definitely show you how one actually performs SEO and the thinking behind it.

Let me start with a site called couponchief.com which is a site that obviously contains coupons. We know that a lot of people are fond of using coupons. Hey, its a nice way to save some money if you're really going to buy stuff anyway.

A novice Webmaster might think that it is nice to optimize this site using "coupon" as the keyword. I say find other keywords under "coupon" that could be better and easier to rank.

Going to http://inventory.overture.com, I found out that "nike coupon" has about 271 searches and "target coupon" has about 17000+ searches. Seems like a good keyword huh?

Let's check google and see how many search results are there for "nike coupon" and "target coupon". The keyword "nike coupon" has 627,000 results while "target coupon" has 512,000 results. This tells me that people are using these keywords in their searches and yet there are less than 1Million pages that compete for these searches.

These 2 keywords are the right keywords to use if you ask me.

The next would be the landing page. What page on the website is suitable for those 2 keywords. After few minutes of searching, here are the 2 best webpages for the 2 keywords.

nike coupon
target coupon

SEO is quite simple actually. A big part is using common sense and using free tools available in the internet to search for the right keywords, and the right webpages on your site.

If there isn't any right webpage on your site for a specific keyword, then make one!