I personally believe that if your site is good enough and useful for your niche, people would definitely like your site and link to you. Now how do you give yourself a start?
First find out the theme of your site. This will help you to determine the keywords. For your information, keywords are the words which you would expect people to search for to reach your site. You can also analyze the search trends by using keyword tools. Though I use ‘Google keyword tool’ and ‘Keyword Discovery’, to be honest, I rely mostly on my own intuition and understanding.
I would like you to note an important point here. Always decide the target audience for your site. Each keyword should be very specific for your niche to bring traffic to your site initially. For example, if your site is about a local leather shoe store, say in the locality Cambridgeshire, you would definitely want people from Cambridgeshire to visit your site. So Keyword- ‘Leather Shoes Cambridgeshire’. Note that this keyword has three words. Two or three keywords are generally good. Another example, if your site is about English music, be specific to decide what your site offers- whether Music classes or English music history or Listening to music? Online Music or Music Downloads? Rock, Pop, Jazz , Soothing Music or Mozart? The target audience here is the whole world. Still you need to be specific about your website.
As already told, each keyword can be one, two or three worded. Now select three to four keywords to start off with. If you consider the search trends while selecting the keywords, it could be a plus point, though not always true.
Now what to do with these keywords? Just use them in your title and description tags and in your home page or the page related to that keyword. There is no hard and fast rule as to how many times you should use the keywords. Just don’t stuff your pages with keywords. Use them naturally as and when required. Use them, one at a time, as the link text while you submit your link at another site. Use them as link text in outward links, only where required.
By MKaur