Finding Keywords That Are SEO Friendly

Quick Exercise:

Open up a new document or grab a pen and paper. Off the top of your head, write down five to ten keywords or phrases that come to mind in relation to what you’re planning to work on. These words and phrases will be your starting point. Once you put them into one of the keyword tools below, you’ll get an idea of what works and what doesn’t. It’s a process and one that gets easier over time.

This is my favorite keyword tool of all time. There are others like it that cost a monthly or annual fee, but they aren’t necessary. First thing you want to do is go to the Google Adwords web page.

Google Adwords works in two ways.

• The first way to use Google Adwords is by typing a keyword into the search box. Then, Google will generate a list of keywords in relation to the one you typed it. It will also show you how much competition that keyword has.
• Another way to use Adwords is to grab a link from your blog or website and put it into the “Website” field. This allows Google to skim your website or blog post for keywords you used as well as others you may have missed.

By using both Adword tools, you can increase site traffic and better optimize your content for search engines.

The second keyword tool I use now and again is by SEOBook. I admit I’m still getting the hang of this one. It works the same way Google Adwords does, but instead of showing your competition and monthly searches, it shows you the most popular phrases it can find that make use of your keywords.

After typing in my keywords, I'm shown numbers for how many times my keywords or phrase has been searched on Google, Yahoo and Bing. This helps in finding trends. By using this along with Google Adwords, you'll get an idea of how to better optimize your hubs, blog posts and online articles.

Along with placing keywords in the footer of your content, you’ll also want to include them in your title as well as sprinkled throughout the page. When you type a search into Google, it first checks to make sure possible results aren’t using fake keywords to gain a higher ranking.

Never use keywords not pertaining to your content. Google frowns upon this and will blacklist your site from their servers until the keyword abuse is removed.

Once your content checks out, Google counts how many times your keywords show up on a single page. The engine then uses all of this information to give you a page ranking–the position you show up at after a search is complete. However, don’t just use the same keyword phrase over and over again in your content. Google likes phrases that are similar, but not the same. Repeating the same words over and over will only harm your chances.