We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Keywords are the soul of SEO. Without keywords, there’s no way to optimize a site for search engines and hence, no SEO. That’s why the right keywords are so valuable, and why it’s so critical for you to seed your site with the perfect keywords to attract the attention of search engines and drive traffic to your site rather than to the other guy’s. To find the best and most effective keywords, you’ll need to start with the most effective keyword software. Here are some of the tools you should be considering using to generate premium keywords.
Wordtracker is the accepted standard for keyword finding in the search industry. It’s incredibly easy to use. You just include a seed keyword, say “diet” if you’re selling weight loss products. You can set the software to do a broader or narrower search of related keywords, and allow it to include variations like misspellings and plurals. Then all you have to do is let Wordtracker go to work for you. You’ll get a list of keyword phrases along with the frequency of those keywords in search engine searches. You can then search the competition to see which popular keywords haven’t been targeted as highly by your competitors. Wordtracker comes with a free version for those who are just starting out or are on a limited budget, and also has a pay version, which is more advanced and has more options.
Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool
This is a basic keyword finder that is a good complement to Google Analytics and Google AdWords. Just choose whether you want to search for keywords by descriptive words or phrases or by website content, input your seed keyword, and start it up. You’ll get a visually user-friendly chart showing all the top keywords along with how competitive they are and local and global search volume. Again, you can broaden or narrow the search as you see fit.
These are only a few of the keyword tools that can help you in your quest for SEO supremacy, but they can take you pretty far. Once you know which keywords have the most power, you can put them to work for you and get the competition on its heels.
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|64.186.234.xxx |2010-02-03 19:19:14 Tom - Broad Keywords vs. More Targeted KeywordsIf you are a small business just getting started and your website has a PR of 2 and below you will need to use a blended strategy where you're building web pages for your primary keywords (most competitive) because you need to rank for them eventually which takes time...
and you'll need to target 3,4 and 5 word combos which may not produce as much traffic but the barrier to entry to rank for those keywords will be much less... and the reality is these keywords also produce a higher quality visitor based on our analytics.
Someone who searches for a more exact phrase has most likely already searched for the broader phrase only to find results that weren't "exactly" what they were looking for.
Best,
Tom
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This is the best piece of advice I've received since I started learning SEO a year ago. My site is exactly one year old and has a page rank of 3. My Texas apartment blog is a PR4 - http://blog.apartmentninjas.com. I haven't been around nearly long enough to go after highly competitive keywords, but that's what I do. I'm seeing a lot of improvement in organic search for the competitive keywords I've been targeting but it took a full year to even show up on the radar and I'm still on the bottom of the second or on the third page nowhere close to the first. I use Adwords to counter this problem.
I want to make out with your last paragraph, "Someone who searches for a more exact phrase has most likely already searched for the broader phrase only to find results that weren't "exactly" what they were looking for". I was always told to target broader phrases in the beginning but I had the mind set that broad keyword phrases/niche keywords were unimportant because they are ...
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Your article is exactly right, but duh. It's easy info. Even the greenest of SEO learners know this. I don't know if your target audience is SEO newbies or if you're just writing articles like this to build content, but either way it's a good post offering quality content. It's lame though. If you visit our blog you'll notice cool articles unlike this one.
Texas Apartments Blog http://blog.apartmentninjas.com
