Keywords are at the heart of achieving high search engine rankings. Search engine spiders look for the keywords in several places on a web page to determine what the site is about and index it accordingly. Once the site is indexed, the search engine will use its ranking algorithms to place that site in a certain position when a keyword search is performed.

There are a limited amount of high-traffic, high-ranking keywords on the Internet. Some search engine optimization companies (SEO companies) disregard this fact entirely and in fact, have built their entire business around letting their customers pick their own keywords and optimizing the customer websites for those keywords.

The trouble with letting customers pick their own keywords is that unless the customer is well-informed and has the correct software, newsletter, or tool to pick high-ranking keywords, most likely the customer will choose low-ranking, low-traffic keywords. This is just what some SEO companies are looking for!

When a customer comes to an SEO company with a handful of low-ranking keywords they want their site optimized for, this makes it 100 times easier for an SEO company to make good on its guarantee (if it has one) and makes it easy to show high-ranking results to their customers after optimization, leading to initial customer satisfaction.

This customer satisfaction is in the initial phase only, when the SEO company presents the customer with a graphic display showing them that 7 of their keywords are ranked number one, 15 are in the top 10, and 42 are in the top 20 on some of the search engines. The customer can do a search on these search engines and verify these results.

The problem with this method is that most likely, these 64 top 20 URL's only collectively gain a few hits a month, whereas one well-chosen, high-ranking, high-traffic keyword, that a page is optimized for may gain thousands of hits per month. Without information on what the high-ranking keywords are, the customer's site will be optimized but will not gain the traffic they are seeking.

Now it is true that if all the SEO companies would go after all of the high-ranking, high-traffic keywords, then the competition between SEO companies would drive some out of business. In order not to be involved in head-to-head competition, some SEO companies choose to let their uninformed customers choose their own keywords, stay in business and let their customers suffer disappointment and disillusionment with SEO companies when their optimized site does not perform up to expectations.

When shopping for an SEO company it is important that customers ask for recommended keywords for their websites and approximately how many hits per month these keywords receive in the search engines. This way the customer will see the potential hits for their site in regards to the chosen keywords and will have more realistic expectations upfront before paying for search engine optimization.