Keyword Research Tools

Before you build a website, you have to decide what it is going to be about, right? Everybody has an idea of that, obviously. If you sell cars, the site will be about cars. If you are a non-profit art school, it will be about your organization’s classes,  and mission etc.

This is great. A good start, but now we get into actually writing the copy for the site, including titles of pages, and headlines, anchor text, etc. We want to know what keywords and keyword phrases people will use to find us, and our product or service, or better yet the generic equivalent of our product or service.

Once you know what phrases users are typing into Google, Yahoo and MSN’s search field, you can target these phrases and have the best chance of someone finding your site.

Paid services such as Word Tracker, and Keyword Discovery are some of the most comprehensive tools that tell you what phrases users are searching for on the web. I use both. Some free options are also a good place to start like, Google’s keyword suggest tool, and Digital Points Keyword tool, along with Yahoo’s (Overture) Search tool.

There are many more tools for keyword research, and I will have to revisit this topic soon to include them all. However, the thing to understand here, is that you want to find phrases that people type into the search engine’s ’search box’ but that don’t have a ton of competition. The less web pages that are seen as being relevant for your chosen phrase, the easier it will be to get that traffic.

You will begin to see patterns of what’s called the long tail of search. That’s the idea that you can target more phrases that consist of 3 or more words (longtail) and get more traffic from them, than spending your time targeting what may be more-searched-for terms, but also have more competition, and the competition can be tough – producing less results.

In summary, it is very important to know what users of Google, Yahoo, and MSN are typing into the search boxes. Only when you know this, will you be able to most effectively target the proper phrases for your site headlines, titles and text. Ultimately making your site relevant for what people are searching for.

If you have any more questions whether your site is targeting the proper phrases for your product or services, contact me through the contact form on this site.

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