Keyword Research

Exploring a niche or optimizing your website for the search engines is all about keywords.

Keywords are the words or phrases (called long-tail keywords) that a person will type into the search engine to find a product or service.

If you want your website to be found at the top of the search engines results you have to optimize your website for those keywords so that the search engines will deem you worthy. It is in the best interest of the search engines to make sure that the most relevant results are listed first - after all this is what keeps their customers happy.

There are many tools available to you to do keyword research on the internet. There are niche market research tools that you can buy and these are very good, especially if you building websites regularly. Or there a number of free ones that you can use.

FREE KEYWORD TOOL NUMBER ONE

One of the first places to start your free keyword research is with the Google Keyword Tool.  You can find that by typing the following into your browser search bar.

 (click to view Google Keyword Tool)

Once on that page we are going to click on check out the new Google keyword tool. And once you have entered the capture code in, to prove you are human, you should be at this page:

(click to see Google Keyword Tool)

You will notice that in this example we have searched for the keyword phrase "build a rabbit hutch." What the search returns is a page full (or two pages) of results. These are all similar or in some way connected results to our search term. You can see how many searches are made for each term globally and locally. You can also see an estimate of the competition for each of these results (we don't take too much notice of that here, but it is good for spotting keywords that have no competition).

That is the kind of search you would do if you were looking to optimize a site and needed to know what keywords people are searching for. If you are just trying to find a niche to build a website for you would do a different search. I will let you in on this secret if you promise not to tell anyone ;)

 (click to search Google Keyword Tool)

You will notice that this time we have used the domain search. If you want to spy on what your competition is up to you can put their domain name in there - it will give you a list of the keywords they are using. Or, as in this case, you can put Google in the search bar. What you then get is a list of keywords currently being searched for on Google. By examining these you can find keywords that are getting good traffic but have low competition. These make great niche sites (and may even turn into sites that make many thousands of dollars) which is why we don't want to tell too many people how to use this tool!

By clicking on the categories on the left hand side bar you are able to search the results by topics that you may be interested in.

FREE KEYWORD TOOL NUMBER TWO

UPDATE: Google has suspended the availability of this tool at this stage.

The second tool I will show you is also a Google tool. It is called the Google Wonder Wheel.

Go to the Google search page and search for your keyword or keyword phrase again. We have used "how to build a rabbit hutch" again. Once you have the search returned you are going to click on the Show options menu as seen above.

(click to view menu)

That will then open the above menu on the left hand side of the search page. If you look down the menu you will see Wonder Wheel listed. Go ahead and click on that.

(click to enlarge the Google wonder wheel)

You should now have something that looks like the above diagram. This another good way to get ideas for material and keywords about your niche.

If you click on any of the keywords on the "spider legs" you will get another spider of related terms to that keyword.

(Click to explore the Google wonder wheel)

Most people do not understand the power of this particular tool. They think that it is just about finding keywords, and they are better using the Keyword Tool above because that gives more data.

The point they are missing (and again, this top secret stuff shhh) is that these particular keywords that Google is telling you it thinks are highly relevant to your original keyword.

So if you are going to optimize a webpage to rank well in the search engines, don't you think it would be beneficial to use the keywords that Google is telling you it thinks are relevant!

FREE KEYWORD TOOL NUMBER THREE

This tool, and the one following, are both a plug-in to the FireFox web browser. If you are using Internet Explorer to browse the internet I highly recommend you bin that and download a browser like Firefox (found at www.mozilla.com/firefox/ and it too is free).

Once you have installed Firefox you can download and install a plug-in called SEOToolbar (which can be found at seobook.com/free-account )

Just some of the many features available to you are shown below.

 (Click To View SEO Toolbar)

The advantage here is that you can see a guide as to how many people are searching for your term on a daily basis. You can see the approximate cost to have your ad shown in the Google adwords listings (that is a story for another day if you do not know what that is). And you see some approximate demographics of the people searching for your keyword - so you know who to target with your sales pitches.

This is a great tool for quick research as you search various terms. There are many other aspects to the tool as explained on their own site.

FREE KEYWORD TOOL NUMBER FOUR

The last keyword tool we are going to take a quick look at is also a Firefox plug-in. It is called WordTracker SEO Blogger and can be found at http:// labs.wordtracker.com/seo-blogger/)

 (click view WordTracker SEO Blogger)

As you can see this tool also locates keywords for you. The great thing about this tool is that when you enter your keyword, and search, it brings up a list of relevant terms with how many searches they get per day (in the US on their search engines).

You can then select terms from the top list and drop them into the second list. Now when you are writing your blog post, or webpage copy, it automatically counts how many times you have used each of the selected terms, and converts it to a percentage of total words.

The advantage of this is that you are able to optimize your copy for the terms. Remember that covering each term is good - using it too many times is bad. That would be considered keyword stuffing. Anything over 10% would certainly be a concern, although it does depend on the amount of words written to some extent.

I hope you find these tools and tips helpful. Remember the more people you tell the more competition you will have.

Dean McNamara - NZ Marketing Systems