Keywords – A Key Component to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Part II

In my last post I talked about what keywords are.  This time, I’m going to go into a bit more about how to determine which keywords are valuable to your online marketing and search engine optimization efforts.  Unlike traditional marketing vehicles where you craft a message that you expect to resonate with prospects, search engine optimization requires you to figure out what words or phrases (keywords) people will use to search for your products or services.  Certainly, this requires you to know your market, your business, and your target prospects, but you also need to know what your competition is doing.  For that, there are some tools that can help you gather more information about what keywords are likely to be valuable to your business AND what keywords your competition is using:

• Google Search Based Keyword Tool (http://www.google.com/sktool/#) – This tool is free and provides some basic information about keywords that could be valuable to you.  It is at the very least insightful and, used correctly, can be invaluable.  Let’s take a look at how it works…  

You can type a domain name in the “domain name” field for suggestions specific to a domain name or you can simply type in some keywords to get “general” information as I did below.

What you’ll find is how often your keywords are used in searches along with some other similar search terms (below).  You’ll also find an estimated dollar amount next to each term.  These dollar amounts are the average prices other businesses are bidding on these terms in their pay-per-click/adwords campaign.  I’ll go more into Google Adwords, pay-per-click campaigns, and writing ads for Google and other search engines in future posts.  For now, however, you can see how this information can be invaluable in your efforts to find the best keywords for your business. 

• Another popular tool is Word Tracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/) which has a few more advanced tools to help you make decisions on your keywords. 

Ultimately, you need to have a good idea what keywords potential prospects are using to look for your products or services.  Once you have a good grasp of the keywords you want to target, you’ll be able to utilize them throughout your search engine optimization efforts.  Next time, we’ll talk about how to use the keywords you’ve targeted.

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