Keyword research is an area that many webmasters forget about when they launch a website, with more time and effort being spent on getting the design and the content right. Often it is only later on, when they don’t see a good ranking in the search engines or a flood of visitors, that they start thinking about Keyword Research and SEO.
Keyword research is the first stage in any search engine optimization campaign, ideally done before you have even got to the website design stage. If you are thinking about keywords retrospectively as a result of a poorly performing website, don’t worry – it is still possible to do your keyword research now and go back and update your poorly performing web pages.
There are many tools and methods available for doing keyword research, but the best keyword research tool is Wordtracker. Wordtracker is the industry’s leading keyword research tool and has a massive database containing over 330 million search terms. It can let you know with a few clicks of your mouse what the most popular keyword phrases in your niche are, along with the number of competing websites and the number of searches per day for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Altavista, Ask and AllTheWeb.
The easiest way to use Wordtracker is to use the Universal Search option. Type in your keywords and use the Thesaurus to find related phrases and synonyms, then click on the words that are interesting to you and simply add these to your “basket”. You can also click on the dig icon to find all phrases that contain that phrase. Once you have built up a list of at least 1000 keywords, choose step 3 and select a “Competition Search”. Within seconds you’ll then be given a report of the number of searches per day for each keyword and the number of competing webpages. This will really help you to narrow down on the right keyword phrase for your website.
In my next post I’ll be talking a little more about how to choose the right keyword phrase from your list and how to use the KEI to help you.
