Step 2 will winnow out your best keyword choices, but now you have to decide what to do with them!

Some of those keywords will be easy to rank highly for with very little effort because there's not much competition. Those are what Parker calls "cheap" keywords. However, she says, "A rule of thumb is that the less competition for a keyword, the less traffic it will bring you because not many people search for it."

Keywords that very large numbers of people search on are usually expensive: you will need hundreds of pages and possibly a "link popularity" of tens of thousands of incoming links from quality websites in your industry. Parker points out that even if you could somehow justify building all that in a matter of weeks or months, Google would not be impressed.

"Google knows that normal sites grow and acquire links gradually over time," she said. "If a keyword has a billion websites competing for it, you'll find that the top ten sites are typically eight to 10 years old, and that's probably how long it's going to take you to make it into their league. Search engine optimization is a long-range strategy with short-term goals at every step."