How to Find Keywords
You may or may not be familiar with keywords. If you are not then you definately need to keep reading. Keywords in a nutshell are the words that people type into a search engine when looking for a website. When you build a website you need to take into account these keywords and incoporate them into your site.
To find keywords you can use a free tool such as:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Let’s say you have a site about gardening. Using the above tool, when you type in the word “gardening” and hit enter. You see a list of the top keyword phrases people type into searches that include the word “gardening”. Here are the top 10 results that were returned today:
| 5707 | organic gardening |
| 2613 | gardening |
| 2036 | national home gardening club |
| 619 | container gardening |
| 574 | square foot gardening |
| 476 | gardening zone |
| 463 | gardening magazines |
| 444 | vegetable gardening |
| 409 | gardening tips |
| 372 | gardening caring for roses |
The number on the left represents how many times the keywords are searched for a day. Some keyword tools show the number of searches a month but this particular tool is by day. As you can see, the keywords “organic gardening” recieve well over 5,000 searches a day. According to these results “organic gardening” is searched more than just the term “gardening” by itself.
Before we decide to target those keywards let’s see what kind of competition there is for the keywords “organic gardening”. Go to Google and perform this search “intitle:organic gardening” (without the quotes). By using “intitle:” in front of the keywords you can see how many webpages are really targeting those keywords by using them in their title. Today there are 320,000 pages with that keyword in the title. That is a pretty big number to compete with just starting out.
Let’s see if there is something with less competition that may be easier to rank well for in the search engines. Try using the “intitle:” search for the keywords “square foot gardening”. Today, there are 24,000 pages with “square foot gardening” in the title. That is a much more reasonable number to compete against when just starting out and learning the basics of search engine optimization.
There are not hard and fast rules, but generally speaking you should be targeting keywords with more than 200 searches a day and as little competition for those keywords as possible.
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