It’s very easy to start optimising and promoting your site willy nilly for the keywords you think it should be top for. I touched on this in my article Top 7 Mistakes People Make When Optimising Their Website
But how do you know whether the keywords you are using are going to do any good at all? You might search for your company website using the word “hairdressing”, but what if everyone else is using “hairdresser”? You’ll be wasting your time focusing all of your efforts on a word that no-one is using to search for you!
So how do you find out what people ARE searching for? Luckily a few nice people have made it very easy to find out which words are being used.
So here are 4 great tools for finding the best keywords and phrases for your website.
Wordtracker http://www.wordtracker.com/
Widely classed as the best tool available, Wordtracker allows you to find out which words and phrases are being searched for countrywide. Starting with just the general theme of your website, it will generate thousands of alternative phrases, as well as telling you how many people have searched for them in the last month. There is a free trial, but when a week’s subscription is just $4.80, it’s worth splashing out for the paid version, which is far superior.
Use this tool to find out how many times your keywords or phrases have been searched for, in the last month and as a monthly average. You can also see how competitive the terms you are choosing are, as well as finding other phrases relating to your originals. If you’re completely stuck for phrases, you can just tell them your website address and Google will suggest phrases based on your site’s content.
Yahoo’s Keyword Calculator http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
A great tool for finding related keyphrases, in the UK. It shows how many people have searched on particular phrases in the last month. If you have a UK account, you can log in and get details of UK phrases, and approximate costs to advertise with this PPC engine.
Good Keywords http://www.goodkeywords.com/
An absolutely fantastic piece of free software that will suggest phrases that you can use, based on some initial input from you. Not only will it suggest alternate phrases, but also mis-spellings, a great help in the world of search engine optimisation. You can also export the lists to text files to make things easier for you.
Nikki Pilkington is owner of UK based SEO and Internet Marketing company NikkiPilkington.com , and writes articles, hints and tips to help people looking to promote their website for free. For more of her articles visit www.nikkipilkington.com and sign up to the newsletter.
Click here to Twitter about this article
If you found this article of interest, please consider sharing it with others using the ‘Share This’ button below to poste to your favourite places.
© Nikki Pilkington Please do not reproduce without either a link or permission
For more articles, click here.
