subject: Keyword Research - How To [print this page] 1. The first thing to do is pick a keyword research tool. Two of the most popular are Freekeywords by Wordtracker and the Google AdWords keyword tool (see URLs below). You may have to sign up for an AdWords account with Google in order to use the AdWords tool, but signup is easy and costs nothing.
2. Type in your search term and it will give you a list of the 100 top searches related to that term and how many people have searched on that term recently.
3. Copy the list into a word processor, delete anything irrelevant and compile the relevant ones. Continue to do this with a few alternate searches on related topics until youve compiled a list of relevant keywords.
4. See if you can find some crossover between those keywords and the content you are creating for your website. Work the keywords into your website copy. Try to include the most important keywords in your headlines, headings and titles. Its a better idea to focus on one or two keywords per page, rather than trying to use too many different keywords on the same page. These days, its all about relevance. Youll get much better results by targeting one or two specific keywords for each web page than cramming a whole bunch of different keywords on the same page.
The nice thing about using a keyword search tool is that you are seeing terms that you know people have been searching for. If you work those same terms into your copy, then theres a good chance that your copy is now optimized for at least having a decent chance of being found in a search.
Be aware that keyword research tools sometimes give slightly misleading results. For example, lets say the search term is info product and the keyword research tool says that there are x number of searches per month on that term. Well, some of those searches could have been for product info. Try it sometime: rearrange the words and look at the results. Often, the number of results is exactly the same.
Once you have your keywords, its important to know where to put them. The most important keyword or two should appear in the title bar; they should also appear in your meta tags and obviously in the body copy of your page or article. The higher up on the page your keywords are, the more weight they will carry as far as the search engines are concerned. Dont stuff your page with keywords; just use them naturally or you could be penalized.
Whatever you do, dont pick keywords that are totally unrelated to your topic in the hopes of getting traffic. It may work in the short term, but it wont in the long term. Search engine companies do not stay in business by serving up irrelevant results.
You can find the keyword tools mentioned above at: https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
