Mike runs a website that sells designer footwear. He wants to start optimising his website for search engines to get more visitors to his site interested in buying designer footwear.

So, Mike makes his title tag 'Designer footwear', and his headings all use the word 'footwear'. He optimises his content and incoming links for this term, and eventually ranks quite high for the terms 'footwear' and 'designer footwear'.

He is surprised that the number of people coming to his site hasn't increased as dramatically as he imagined. He is ranking number 1 for his term whats going on?

Mike has made a common error in his SEO campaign.

As Google posted yesterday on their official blog, synonyms are very important in search. In fact, they estimate that over 70% of all searches worldwide are affected by synonyms.

So of all the people searching for designer footwear online, around 70% of them could be using synonyms, the most obvious being the term 'shoes'.

Before optimising his site, Mike should have considered what other words people might use to search for his product. He might have wanted to optimise for a number of these terms, or at least concentrated on the highest volume.

SEO takes time, you want to get the keywords right because you then put a lot of time into each keyword you optimise for.

When doing your keyword research, first come up with all the synonyms, plurals, regional variations and coloquialisms you can, and then rank them in order of traffic volume. This will help you decide which terms you want to focus on and ensure you're not wasting your time.

P.S. While reading up about this today, I found another tip on Searchengineland, that I never use -

you can use the tilde symbol (~) to force Google to show additional synonyms (and related words) for your query. For example, a search for [~murder statistics] leads Google to bold words like “crime,” “crime statistics,” “suicide statistics,” “criminal,” and more.

I did some quick comparisons doing this, and discovered that for ~murder, 4 of the page one entries are about 'suicide', not murder, but more strangely (and less controversial), the number one result for the term ~shoes is the Apple store!